How to Write a Blog

Writing a successful blog post all comes down to the proper preparations. It starts before you even begin writing: what do you want to say and to whom do you want to say it? You might want to get going right away but remember writing takes some time. And once you’ve written an awesome blog post, you’ll need to invest time in promoting it and keeping the content up to date. Today, we’ll cover all you need to do to write a successful blog.

Step 1: Preparation

Develop a short list of Key Words that help Google find your blog…short, to the point, 100 characters at most, separated by commas.  Do this as you decide upon a topic for your blog post (blogs are “binary logs” that are posted to the website, ergo…blog post). Don’t start typing just yet. First, it’s time to prepare the post! That means you must answer a few questions…

What is the purpose of your post?

Before you start writing, you should first take some time to think about why you’re writing and what you want to achieve with this specific article. Articles can have different purposes:

• You can write because you want to persuade people. You want to convince them to buy your product or adopt your ideas.
• The aim of your article could also be to entertain and amuse people. A column is a good example of an entertaining text.
• Your blog or article could also be informative. In this case, you want to share knowledge about a certain topic.

Different articles on your website can have different purposes. A blog can be informative as well as entertaining. In any case, it’s important to think about the purpose of your article because it will give you a direction to follow. An article that intends to persuade people should be written differently than an article with a solely informative or amusing function.

What is the main message of your post?

You should also think about what you want your readers to know or take away after they’ve read your text. We refer to this as the message of your text.

For example…

If you want to write a post about the importance of well-structured texts, the central question of the post could be: ‘Why is it important to write well-structured blog posts?’

To formulate your message, you should try to phrase a question that your text should answer.  Try to come up with a summarized answer to your central question in one or two sentences. This summarized answer is the message of your blog.

Put the message in the introduction of the post (where you tell readers what the post is about) as well as in the first paragraph and the conclusion of the piece. Making your message explicit helps readers to instantly grasp the message of your article and increases the likelihood that people will keep reading (teachers learn to start with what they are going to teach, then teach, and then end with what they taught…1, 2, 3).

Who are your readers?

Ideally, you already thought about the kind of audience you want to reach, but it never hurts to remind yourself before writing your text. So, take some time to think about the people you are writing for. Make sure you adapt your text to them and adjust the difficulty level of the information in your article as well as the difficulty of your style (use of jargon, long sentences, etc.). A good rule of thumb is to keep things readable and accessible to reach a wider audience.

What information do you need?

Sometimes, all the information you need to write your text is already in your head. For example, if the chef of a local Italian restaurant wants to write a blog post about the types and uses of pasta, they probably don’t need to open any books. But if they want to write an elaborate culinary history about 500 years of Italian cuisine, they might need some other sources. So, determine whether you need sources (the internet, books, newspapers) to get the information you need for your text.

You should take the central question of your piece and come up with several sub-questions you want to answer. Find and formulate answers to all your sub-questions using your sources (books, the internet, scientific articles, etc.). This will provide you with the basis of your post or article.  But do not plagiarize, if you quote, give credit to the source.

After this phase, you might want to make some adjustments to the (central) message of your article. Take some time to phrase or rephrase your message (the summarized answer to your central question) to make it entirely clear.

What’s the best way to structure your text?

The final step in the preparation process is the most important one. You must decide how you’ll structure the information you want to communicate to your readers. If you don’t think about this beforehand, the odds are your text will lack a logical order and will be hard to follow for your audience.

Step 2: Write your blog post!

At this point, you’ll have all the information you need and an outline of the subjects you want to discuss in your blog post.

Try to stick to the structure you decided on and make sure your tone and style are in line with the audience you want to reach. Also, you don’t have to write your blog post from start to end. Feel free to switch between paragraphs and skip hard bits to get back to later on. Whatever feels most natural to you!

Step 3: Correcting, editing, and optimizing.

Once you’ve put everything on (digital) paper, it’s time for the editing phase. Now, you should look more closely at your text and smooth out weird sentences and errors. This means checking for mistakes on a sentence and paragraph level, and evaluating whether the structure of your blog post makes sense. If you’re not an experienced writer, it can be very helpful to use online spell checks or to ask someone you know to read your text. Another pair of eyes has a fresh perspective on your text and can, therefore, spot mistakes much more easily.  You can even read it out loud to yourself!

Optimize your post for the search engines!

Optimizing for search engines should, of course, be a big part of preparing your post for publication. For example, it’s important to check the distribution of your keywords, meta description, and the readability of your text. We will help you with this!

Step 4: More to do before publishing

Before you send your new masterpiece into the world, there are a few more things to do to improve your post’s chances of doing well:

Don’t forget to add images!

Images are an invaluable addition to (almost) every blog post. So before publishing your post, you need to add at least one quality image. Some bloggers prefer to create photos and images before writing their texts. Others prefer to first write and then find the correct images. Whether you use stock photos or create your graphics, make sure you have at least a header image that can also be shared on social media.

Add categories and tags!

Categories and tags provide an extra layer of structure for your site, so you need to give some thought to how you use those.   The website already has a well-defined set of categories, but we can always add more.  Tags are words that cut across multiple categories and aid in searches.

Conclusion

Writing a blog post can be a lot of fun, but also a lot of work. Once it’s written, you must make sure it gets the attention it deserves by sharing and improving your text. This might seem like a lot, but in the end, you’ll see your content consistently perform well. And trust us, it will be worth it!