How to Write a Blog Post: 5 Easy (& Proven) Tips to Follow
The actual act of starting a blog is simple on the surface, but once you do a bit of digging into the process of crafting and publishing the perfect piece of work, things can get quite complicated rather quickly.
Typing a few words into an online word-processor and then clicking the Publish button is simple enough, but figuring out how to write blog posts that will capture the attention of your audience as best as possible is something that requires a bit of added work and practice.
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Seeing as how each blog and blogger is unique in their writing style and with the type of people that visit it, there isn’y necessarily a one-size-fits-all answer, but there are 5 tried and true tips that will help you figure out what to write a blog post about.
Mastering these tips and tricks won’t really come overnight, so with that being the case, let’s stop wasting time and get started!
5. Establish An Understanding For Your Audience
While you might be the one doing all of the work for writing your blog posts and getting them published on the World Wide Web, the people who are reading your content will either make or break the success of your blog and site as a whole.
It can be easy to get wrapped up with writing about only things that you’re comfortable with, and if your audience has a genuine interest in the work that you’re familiar with, then keep doing what you’re doing! However, if you find that your readers aren’t all that enthralled with what you’ve been writing, you’ll want to reach out to them and get an understanding for what kind of content they’d like to see and read.
Just how can you go about this though? For starters, take a glance through the comments being posted on your articles. If you see people raving about how much they like your work, then it’s quite likely that you’re doing something right. However, if you see people complaining, reach out and respond to them to see what it is that you could do better with your work.
Find out what it is your readers want to read about, and then go and write a blog post about it. You should always only write about stuff that you have a genuine interest in, as the act of blogging should always be fun and enjoyable for you. However, along with that, you also want to be sure that the stuff you’re kicking out is something that your audience has expressed a genuine interest in.
Finding a happy middle ground between these two things can sometimes prove to be quite difficult, but once you find it, the increase in traffic you’re going to see can be quite tremendous. Writing about stuff you enjoy and having articles that your readers are taken with truly is the perfect mix, and once it becomes apparent to you, you’ll be living in the best of both worlds.
4. Come Up With A Topic And Intriguing Title
Before you start writing the actual body of your article, you should first figure out what topic you want to write about. Do you want to inform your readers on how to edit a video using Final Cut Pro, or do you want to make a guide of the top 10 apps of 2016? Figuring out just what it is you want to write about should always be the first step in your writing process, and doing so will be much easier once you have a good understanding of your audience.
This might seem like a silly thing to make an entire tip about, but so many people forget to do a bit of simple planning before they start writing. You might be enticed to simply hit the ground running and start getting words typed out, but if you don’t have solid game plan in place before you do this, you’re going to find yourself lost after a bit of preliminary writing.
In order to avoid this, simply take a few minuets to decide just what it is you want to talk about in your article. Is there a question you want to answer? Is there a bit of info you’d like to share with your audience? Would you like to present your readers with a question? All of these are important questions to ask yourself before you actually start writing, and it’ll make the whole process considerably easier and more stress-free.
And, once you’ve got your topic nailed down, make sure that you create a title as well before you get into the meat of your work. Finding the perfect title is just as important as nailing down what you want to write about, as a title can be the difference as to whether or not someone decides to click on your blog to read more.
Your title should be between about 40 and 60 characters, and it should offer a solid glimpse into what you’re writing about. For example, if you have a blog that’s going to be about how to repair a wooden chair, your article title should be something along the lines of “Have a broken wooden chain? Follow these 5 tips to repair it.”
The title of your article should be catchy, snappy, and make someone who sees it want to click on it in order to get more information. Like a lot of the tips on this list, this is something that will become easier as you practice it more and more.
3. Write A Captivating Intro To Draw Your Readers Into Your Article
If you’re wondering “How do I write a blog post?” and the first two tips we’ve gone over don’t seem all that important to you (although they really are), please make sure that you pay close attention to this one - make sure your article as a captivating intro.
The introduction to your article is arguably the most important component to the entire thing. Similar to the title of your article, having an intro that’s boring and flat will result in most people not wanting to read on. You can have excellently written content that’s extremely informative and well thought out, but if your intro isn’t interesting, most people will click away and find something else to read.
When writing your introduction, you want to create something that catches your readers’ attention and makes them want to keep scrolling on down. You might be inclined to get things started by talking about what your article is about, but an intro like this simply isn’t interesting.
Dig deep into those creative juices that are flowing through your brain and come up with something that’s exciting, mysterious, and as intriguing as possible. Do your best to captivate your audience right off the bat, and once you’ve accomplished this, you can then go on to briefly explain what the meat of your article is going to be about.
Once you’ve captured the attention of your audience and they’re hooked, you’re good to go on with the rest of your work. This usually proves to be one of the most challenging tips to master for people who are trying to figure out how to write a blog post, but it’s easily one of the most important ones to keep in mind with all of your work.
Some loyal readers of your work might not be that worried about an interesting introduction because they already know that they like the work that you kick out, but for everyone else, the intro of your article will be the deciding factor as to whether or not they want to keep reading. And, if they find an article of yours without an interesting intro, they’ll likely get bored and decide that they don’t have time to ever visit your blog again.
People have incredibly short attention spans, and that’s why the introduction aspect for your work is so incredibly important. Make it interesting and exciting, and then worry about the rest of your article.
2. Organize Your Writing And Make It Visually Appealing
If you asked us “How do you write a blog post?”, we’d answer by saying we do so in an organized manner.
Organization is another incredibly important thing to be aware of when writing a blog post, as having a mass of words with little to no organization is the last thing that you want to do. If you’re a frequent reader of our content, you’ll know that we frequently make use of short paragraphs, headers, and bulleted lists.
We don’t just do this because we find this style of writing fun - we do it because it makes our content much more enjoyable and easier to read. If this article was nothing but long blocks of text, there’s a good chance that most of you would have stopped reading far before this point in it.
Long blocks of text and the absence of headers and lists might work in books and novels, but that’s an entirely different breed of writing. When you’re writing a blog post, you want to make sure that you’re keeping your info organized in a manner that keeps everything looking short and sweet.
This might seem impossible if you have a lot of ground to cover and there’s a lot of information that you want to talk about, but even if there’s piles and piles of info that you need to go over, there are still tools you can make use of to keep your content looking as organized and clutter-free as possible.
Even in an article like this where there are a lot of different points that we have to go over, the way in which we wrote it keeps everything visually appealing to you (the reader).
So, in short, keeping your articles organized and interesting to read can be achieved through the following -
- Short sentences
- Petite paragraphs
- Headers to break up main points/topics
- Lists to organize similar, short ideas
There are lots of services online that offer free templates for you to follow in order to get the best look possible for your blog, and while you can certainly make use of something along those lines, it’s easy enough to do it on your own in the word-processor of your choice.
And hey, if you do find yourself needing some inspiration, just take a look through some of our other posts!
1. Write, Write, And Then Write Some More
Last but not least, just write. All of these tips can be used in conjunction with one another to make the writing process as easy as possible for you, but don’t get too flustered if you can’t get started. At the end of the day, simply typing out some words or getting something on paper is the best way to get started.
You can always go back to your work and refine it later on before you decide to publish it for all of your readers, but you can’t make revisions and fine tune things until you actually start writing. Learning how to make use of the above tips and then just starting to write can offer a bit of a learning curve at first, but after working at it for about a week or so, you’ll notice that everything simply starts to flow quite naturally.
Coming up with creative intros will get easier and easier, understanding what your audience is interested in won’t be a challenge at all, you’ll know how to keep your content looking interesting, and you’ll be able to do all of this while simply writing and not being afraid of making mistakes.
Final Thoughts
As you can now see, the answer to how to write a blog post is a bit weightier than you might have been expecting. There are quite a lot of different aspects and tips to keep in mind to make sure that your content is as well thought out and refined as possible, but as we mentioned above, powering through the difficulty of putting all these tips together will get easier as time goes on. And, once you get a hang of it, writing blog posts will be more enjoyable than ever.