There are many reasons why you may want to learn how to write a blog post in order to start your own blog. Perhaps you have just launched a business and have heard how effective blogs can be in driving customers to your website.
Maybe you love to travel and take great photos of your adventures and want to share your stories with friends and family back home.
Or maybe you just want to have a way to chart your progress toward meeting a goal or to explore a way to express yourself in a creative way. So, let’s get started with the basic guide below, which will give you an introduction to the foundations of blog writing.
Future posts will elaborate on each step of the path.
Choosing a Blog Post Topic
The first question you may ask yourself is, “So what exactly should I write about?” It seems like a simple question, but it is a very important one. The most important thing to consider is that writing blog posts requires some effort and dedication.
Therefore, you want to make sure that you are writing about topics that are interesting not only to your readers but to yourself as well.
Of course, if you choose a topic that is not interesting to your potential readers, they simply will not read it. End of story. So you do want to make sure you are writing about topics that people want to learn more about.
But it can be challenging to stay devoted to writing about topics that are not interesting to you as well, so it’s important to consider your own interests when choosing a blog post topic.
Think About What Your Personal Interests Are
Take a few minutes to visualize yourself writing about a certain topic. Are you interested enough in it to write a blog post? Keep in mind that, though you will see inconsistent information in this, blog posts should be at least 850 words in length. That’s a fair bit, so you will have to stay motivated.
First and foremost, try to find a topic that is of interest to you that you will remain motivated to continue to write about.
Develop a List of In-Demand Keywords
However, unless you truly are writing for a very specific audience — family, friends, classmates, colleagues at work — your topics are going to also need to be of interest to a more general audience.
One tool that is very helpful in determining reader interest in topics, known as “keywords,” is the Google Keyword Planner, a tool that is a part of Google Ads. For a more detailed explanation in using the Google Keyword Planner, please see my article on that topic. Don’t worry, you don’t have to actually place ads on Google. You can use their keywords tool for free.
Use the keyword planner to develop a list of 10-12 keyword phrases to serve as a guide to selecting the topics of your blog posts.
After you have carefully chosen your keyword phrases, it’s time to start writing your post!
Start with a Captivating Headline
Headlines are critically important to the success of your blog post. They are usually the first thing that your readers will look at. In fact, 80 percent of your readers will most likely scan your article first, reading only the headlines, before reading the first word in your actual content.
Based on reading your headlines alone, they will then decide whether to read your post. If you have lackluster headlines, it’s highly unlikely that your reader will continue to read on.
Write Your Headlines First
Thus, taking a “headlines first” approach to writing your posts will give you two advantages. First, you can focus strictly on writing the best headlines and then shift to writing the content under each headline later. This will help you to zero in on fine-tuning and polishing your headlines before you set out writing the body text.
Second, writing your headlines first will help you stay organized throughout your entire post. If you start with a blank page (or screen I should say) and write ALL of your headlines first, you can more freely chart out how your want to organize your post’s content.
You will find this is a great way to form the structure of your post. Writing a lot of content and then trying to organize it later is much more challenging than having the headlines already written and then using them as a way to stay intent on writing content that only fits in with that specific headline.
Don’t Forget Your Subheads
To make your posts even more organized, you can further refine your content using subheads, which are more specific than your headline. The headlines you see above in this post are examples. The main headline is “Start with a Captivating Headline,” and the subhead is “Don’t Forget Your Subheads.”
The subhead zeros in a little more than a headline. Subhead topics should be closely related to that of the main head.
Capture Your Reader’s Attention Right from the Start
We as a society are busier today than we were in years past. Whereas just a few decades ago, we had to actively seek information, these days it finds us. Sometimes it even bombards us. So you have to capture your reader’s attention right from the start. This is called a hook.
Let’s look at just three ways to hook your reader from the very first sentence.
- Ask a question: Asking a question of your readers makes them think. Even if they just subconsciously answer the question, often they will read on just to discover what your answer is.
- Include a quotation:. We readers love quotes. We feel that the content is starting off with a real human voice, which we prefer to hear. Including a relevant quote humanizes your post and draws your reader in.
- Tell a story: Who doesn’t like a good story? Like a quotation, a story makes the post more human, and therefore more appealing to your readers. Just be sure to keep it short and to the point.
Use Short Paragraphs and Sentences
If there’s one immediate and easy improvement that you could make to your blog posts, it would be breaking your content into smaller paragraphs. Contrary to a long-standing custom of a paragraph being as many as seven or nine sentences, paragraphs in blog posts should be, as a guide, no more than three sentences.
Even a paragraph of one sentence is fine. This is especially true when emphasizing something.
Also, though, look at your longer sentences to see if any need to be shortened. Better to have two shorter sentences than one long one. However, the ideal structure of a post will have sentences of varying lengths. This adds variety to your writing.
If there’s one immediate and easy improvement that you could make to your blog posts, it would be breaking your content into smaller paragraphs.
Include Transitions
Transitions are words like, “First,” “Second,” “Third,” “Finally,” “However,” “For example,” In addition, and “Yet. They give your blog post a highly organized look and feel. Your reader will appreciate the flow of your content and will be more likely to read more of your posts if they are organized using transitions.
Stay Organized
Transitions are a great start, but paragraphs themselves should have an organized structure. Each paragraph should logically follow the one before it. If your reader reads two paragraphs that seem unified and the a third one that does not appear to be related to the first two, they get confused. And confused readers are not happy readers.
They tend to stop reading your post.
So, there you have it: a quick and basic guide to get started on your first blog post. Stay tuned for future posts that will examine more ways to write great blog posts that your readers will enjoy.