Blogging, for a long standing, has been a great way to share knowledge, information, and opinions. It can be a great idea for marketers or companies to market their products. A blog should be easy to understand.
Blogging offers you the opportunity to present yourself in front of new readers on the internet, and help attract traffic to your website. Blogging is the of the steps to getting into the world of writing.
Any article, new article, or guide that is posted in a website’s blog area is referred to as a blog post. They may aid you in increasing brand recognition, credibility, conversions, and profits. Most importantly, they can assist you in increasing website traffic.
While writing a blog, you should consider your goal, target audience, and what you want the readers to take away. Be sure who is your audience or potential audience and what type of content will offer them value. For example Hypeyeti marketing targets brands or individuals who want to explore and get informed about digital marketing in general.
Before writing a blog post, these are the points you must follow:
#1 Choose A Topic
The first and foremost thing to do before you start writing a blog is to choose the topic you’ll be writing about. Choosing anything is a difficult task. You keep getting caught in a dilemma whether you chose the right one or not. However, you should choose the topic of your blog considering what your target audience will like to read about.
Before choosing a topic you must have good knowledge about who is your potential readers if you’re writing a blog for a brand or a business. That way you can focus the topics and content for them. Write on those topics which provide value to your audience.
Another easy and efficient way to choose a topic for your blog is to check on what type of content other companies in your industry are publishing. I am not advising you to plagiarize their work or steal their ideas; you can simply get inspired by their contents and write on similar topics with a distinct and unique angle.
#2 Competitors Analysis / Research
A big part of writing a blog is to research the said and chosen topics. The blog has to be factually accurate and no information on the blog should be misleading or can be in the wrong order.
Nobody has all the knowledge about every topic they choose to write about. Even professional bloggers sometimes don’t know anything about a topic before they sit down to write about it.
You should be curious enough to know more about a completely new topic. As a writer one has to be comfortable jumping from one topic to another, even if the topic is completely strange for you.
You will lack Information and insights before writing on a new topic. Therefore, you should do research. While doing research, don’t fully rely on one source. Also, don’t blindly trust the information provided on Wikipedia, quora, or Reddit.
All information you get must be fact-checked multiple times. Choose authoritative sources for the facts and information. Examples of authoritative sources are government websites, highly reviewed research papers, and international associations or institutions.
#3 Create An Outline / Structure
Now, that your topic and the research on the particular topic are completed, it’s time to create an outline. An outline helps to make a rough idea so that you’ll not lose track. List out the necessary subtopics and sub-points for your blog. Also, put the important pieces of information that you want to include in your blog on a rough page.
An outline is a description of the format of your content. Sometimes after we plan or research some topic, we miss out or forget to write a lot of things unknowingly.
Creating an outline will assist in building and organizing ideas in a logical and sequential manner. Eventually, when the content outline is ready, you will have enough confidence in yourself to start writing the blog.
The outlines shouldn’t be too long. For example, this is the outline of this blog I made before:
Introduction
A brief summary of what is a blog and what you should keep in mind before writing it
Step 1- Choose a topic
- How should a blogger choose a topic?
Step 2 – Research
- Why and how should you research a particular topic.
Step 3 – Create an outline
- What is the outline and format of the outline of this blog?
Step 4 – Use transition words
- Tips on why and where to use transition words.
Step 6 – Utilize images effectively
- Impact of using images in the blog.
Step 7 – Review and edit
- Things to Avoid, How to edit yourself,
Step – 8 Create a compelling headline
- Importance of a catchy headline, and how to write one.
Conclusion
- wrap-up
The main purpose of this outline is to keep me on track while writing. When I have an outline I’ll be honest about my plans and avoid unnecessary points and information. An outline is just a rough idea to keep you on track so that you can write it on a piece of paper or word or notepad. Basically, write it wherever you feel comfortable.
#4 Use Transition Words
The space between the paragraphs is not enough to keep the readers hooked on the content. The transition words play an important role to connect and link ideas in sentences. They make it clear to your reader how words, sentences, and even paragraphs connect to one another.
Some examples of transition words are: afterward, always, at last, at once, briefly, eventually, finally, immediately, sometimes, in the meantime, after, last, later, meanwhile, as soon as, now, often, once, promptly, soon.
Furthermore, transition words make the flow of the sentence and paragraph more smooth while reading. You can improve the readability of your content by adding transition words to your writing. These words make the readers prepared for what’s coming.
For example:
Our team scored 3 goals. As a result, we won the game.
When a person reads the above sentences, they’ll consider two things. One is that the action of the first sentence caused something and the second sentence will describe the effect. Therefore, by using the transition word “As a result” we managed to show two distinct sentences as a part of one process.
#5 Utilize Images Effectively
The first thing you should keep in mind is you are writing for the web not print. Being said that your readers can easily lose interest and jump to use Twitter or Instagram within munites if you cannot hook their attention to your blog.
That is why images are important. Images help to boost the flow of your blog. When you include an image between the paragraph, you break up the text which will look visually appealing to the readers.
Images help people understand complicated topics. Texts are not of enough help to make your readers understand if the topic is quite complicated. That is why images are an essential tool to make it easy and take it to a larger audience. Other visual aspects like charts, infographics, and tables also help readers to understand the complex subjects.
#6 Review and Edit
People mistake that editing is easy when you’re done writing. Actually, editing could be a lot harder sometimes. Editing includes fixing grammatical errors, checking the spelling, the tone of a sentence, etc. Sometimes you should sacrifice many sentences and points that you put hours of time to write. Some important factors you should consider while editing is:
1. Avoid Repetition
One thing that always irritates people is repeated words and sentences. Once you’ve already made a point about something, there’s no need to keep repeating them in any part of the blog. That is why after you’re done writing go and check if you’ve repeated any words or sentences time and again.
2. Keep Sentences And Paragraphs short
Readers will freak out if they see a whole pile of words before reading. This is a common mistake a beginner blog writer can make. The sentences should be short and paragraph-even shorter.
Make sure you maintain a maximum of 200 words per sub-topic and put a paragraph break in every 3-4 sentences. This way you can trick the readers that your blog is short and they will keep on reading. Short sentences make the reader’s job easier.
3. Have Another Person Review Your work
This is a must-do for an inexperienced or beginner blog writer. When you let someone read your blog, it is a sign of commitment that you want to get better at it. If possible, ask someone with some editorial skill or someone who loves reading to review your work.
Tell that you don’t want them to spot grammatical mistakes, but that you want to review whether the content flow is readable or not, is the structure of the blog is correct or not, is the content and headline of the blog match or not, etc. After you get these answers, reedit or rewrite accordingly.
#7 Create A Compelling Headline
Everybody has different opinions on how to write a headline. Some say your headlines should be very specific and others say that the headlines should be abstract or vague. I prefer to write specific headlines as they don’t confuse the audience about what type of blog they are spending their time reading.
A bigger debate about writing a blog headline is whether to write before you finish writing the blog or you first choose or decide on the headline and only start the writing. I like to write it later when I am done writing all the content. That is why I put this sub-topic at the end of the blog.
A good headline attempt to generate interest, capture the attention of readers, influence your mindset, and make you curious. A headline is a deciding factor in whether a reader wants to open the article or not. People will simply ignore your blog if they don’t find the heading interesting enough.
Those headlines that make the audience curious work most of the time. For example, the headline of this blog is How to write a blog post? Now those who are interested in writing will surely click on this blog but it might also influence those who are not interested much but want some answer to the question they just asked themselves.
Conclusion
That’s all we wrote about how one can write a blog post. These steps will help you to start your journey in writing blogs. None of the steps above hold less importance. They all should be considered seriously before you jump into writing a blog. Keep learning and writing.
If there’s any particular point I missed to cover or you have any questions about my process of writing a blog, feel free to leave a comment below.
