Author Archives: Amrit Hallan

About Amrit Hallan

Amrit Hallan is a professional content writer who helps businesses improve their conversion rate through credible and compelling content writing. His main strength lies in writing search engine optimized content without compromizing quality and meaningfulness.

How to increase your email open rate in 5 easy steps

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5 steps to improving your email open rate

5 steps to improving your email open rate

How to increase your email open rate?

Do you know what is the average email open rate?

How many people are likely to open your emails when you send out an email marketing campaign?

Different industries have different email open rates, according to this Smart Insights report.

The overall average is 29.55%, according to the above link, which is quite high than what I expected.

This MailChimp report on the same topic shows that the average email open rate is 21.33%, which is a lot less then what the Smart Insights report says.

But MailChimp must have used its own servers to get data because it is an email marketing company.

Since MailChimp is an email marketing company, and it has used its own servers to derive data, I think they have more reliable data for different industries.

You can see the tabular data on both the links that I have included above.

How to improve your email open rate?

I would like to make an interesting observation.

According to the MailChimp report, agriculture and food services industry has an email open rate of 23.31%.

Emails from government have an open rate of 28.77% because most of the time they carry useful information that people need.

Hobbies related emails enjoy an open rate of 27.74%.

Religion related emails are close at 27.62%.

In the table, the lowest email open rates seem to be for daily deals and coupons (15.06%) and e-commerce (15.68%).

One would expect that daily deals and coupons emails may enjoy a higher open rate, but it seems people pay more attention to the emails that are close to their hearts rather than emails that simply offer discounts and lower rates for products and services.

What is email open rate?

Before learning how to improve your email open rate, it is important to know what it means.

Your email open rate is the percentage of recipients who open a specific email out of the total number of subscribers you have in your mailing list.

Mathematically, it is the number of people who opened email divided by the total number of emails you sent in a campaign, multiplied by 100.

Email open rates screenshot

Email open rates screenshot

Hence, if your email open rate is 25%, it means for every 100 emails that you send, 25 are opened.

You learn how to increase your email open rate – is it enough?

Not necessarily.

It is one of the factors.

It is one of the most important factors, in fact.

Unless someone opens your email message, how is he or she going to respond to it?

Hence, your first priority is to make sure that the maximum number of people open your email when you send out your email marketing campaign.

The second factor is the CTR – click-through-rate.

Every email campaign has a CTA – call-to-action.

It may be a “Buy” button.

It may be a “Download” button.

It may be a “Contact us now” link.

Whatever you want your recipients to do after they have gone through your email, is your call-to-action.

How convincing your message and call-to-action are, decide your CTR.

Now we come to the main topic of the post:

How to improve your email open rate

As I have written above, before something constructive can happen to your email marketing campaign, it is very important that maximum number of people open your emails.

The process of improving your email open rate is long-term and short-term.

The long-term process is improving your reputation to such an extent that when people encounter your email in their inbox, they immediately open it.

The short-term process is giving compelling information through the subject line, email extract, and even the name from which the email has come, to reassure people and make them open your email.

Listed below are 5 tips that can help you increase or improve your email open rate.

1. Optimize your subject line

After the name of the sender, it is your subject line that people read without opening your message.

Your subject line tells people why they should open your message.

If your subject line doesn’t inspire people, they won’t like your email message.

Your email will remain unopened.

Your email open rate will decline.

No matter how great your offer is, unless people read your offer, they are not going to be able to take its advantage.

Your subject line is like the main headline of your blog post or web page.

You may like to read: 8 types of headlines you can use in copywriting

Just like the headline, if your subject line fails to impress people, they won’t read further.

Never use your subject line to mislead people into opening your message.

You may be able to increase your email open rate for the time being, but once people begin to mistrust you, even if you are sending them a genuine offer, they won’t believe you.

According to this Optinmaster blog post, 47% email recipients open an email based on the subject line.

69% email recipients on the other hand mark an email as spam based on the subject line.

Hence, your subject line can be a double-edged sword.

Be mindful of what words you use in your subject line.

Defining the best subject line can be a tricky business.

There are many words that can get your email marked as spam, especially words containing “money”, “Casino”, and “meet singles”.

This Hubspot blog post contains a list of 394 words that can get your email message marked as spam, so, try to avoid them.

You can use AB testing to arrive at the best subject lines.

Define two subject lines with careful consideration.

Then send 50% of the emails using one subject line and 50% using the other.

After a couple of days, your email marketing service like MailChimp will give you the data on how many people opened your emails for those subject lines.

Then choose the subject line that performs better and create an improved version of it.

Then again sent 50% of the emails with one subject line and 50% using another subject line.

After a few AB testing phases, you will be able to arrive at the best subject line to use to increase your email open rate.

What defines a good email subject line that can help you improve your email open rate?

Here are a few suggestions:

  • Personalize your subject line
  • Keep it short and sweet
  • Start telling a story
  • Create suspense or another strong emotion
  • Ask a question
  • Create a mystery

2. Use segmentation to improve your email open rate

Most of the contemporary email marketing services these days provide you the facility to create segments based on user behavior.

For example, MailChimp allows you to create segments based on

  • People who opened your last email message within a range of days.
  • People who have been opening your messages for the past number of campaigns.
  • People who have opened your email message at least once in the past 25-50 email campaigns.
  • Regions from where people open your email messages the most.

And so on.

On some instances only segmentation can help you increase your email open rate almost by 40% (source).

Who are more likely to open your email message?

Someone who has already opened your messages in the recent past or someone who has never opened your messages?

Certainly, someone who has been responding to your messages is more likely to open them.

What is the use of segmentation if it reduces the size of your email list?

Remember that people who are not opening your messages are anyway not going to open them.

Why waste bandwidth on those people?

They may have subscribed to your mailing list due to whatever reason, but now they are no longer interested in hearing from you, and maybe too lazy to unsubscribe.

But if you use a service like MailChimp, you pay for every message that you send, whether that message is opened or not.

Therefore, segmentation doesn’t just help you increase your email open rate, it also reduces your email marketing costs.

3. Find the optimal time to improve your email open rate

Whether your email is opened or not also depends on at what time the recipient receives your email message.

Sometimes people can be too busy and even if they want to open your email message, they have no time.

At certain periods of the day they are deluged with email and even when they are interested, they end up ignoring your email.

Just as your email marketing service tells you how many people open your last campaign, they also tell you at what time they mostly opened it.

You will need to spend some time to gather such data and hence, it is a long-term process.

You may have to analyze 10-15 campaigns and gather the data in an Excel sheet.

You will need to find out on which days people open your messages the most and at what time they open your messages the most.

After that, try sending your email messages on those days and at that time.

For example, if the optimal time for you to send out your email marketing campaign is on Thursday at 10 AM, you can schedule your email marketing message accordingly.

Your email marketing service should be able to send out the message based on the recipient’s time zone.

This can be one of the best ways to increase your email open rate.

4. Request your recipients to add your email to their “whitelist”

20% emails don’t reach the inbox of your recipients (source).

Spam settings are the culprit.

Some spam settings are set by the user and some are set by email services like Gmail and Outlook.

I have seen that even legitimate messages that have got nothing to do with email marketing, are directly sent to the spam folder sometimes by the Gmail feature of Google Workspace.

Emails can be manually added to the whitelist.

When people are subscribing to your mailing list, politely remind them that they should add the email ID from which they will be getting your messages to their whitelist so that the messages are not redirected to the spam folder.

Also use double opt-in to subscribe to your mailing list.

In double-opt in, they must click a verification link that is sent on the email ID they initially submitted to your subscription form.

They will be able to click the verification link only when they open the email message from you.

Once they open your email message for verification, your email ID is automatically added to the whitelist.

5. Regularly engage your email recipients

This is one of the sure shot ways of improving your email open rate.

When people don’t receive your messages regularly, they tend to ignore your messages.

If they get in the habit of opening your messages, it can significantly increase your email open rate.

If you want to know how to improve your email open rate, consistency is the key.

This is a long-term process, of course.

If you regularly send valuable information through your email messages, your recipients will grow to expect your emails on certain days or at certain times.

Once they begin to find value in your email messages, they will eagerly open them.

Although, how successful your email marketing campaigns are depends on multiple factors, one of the foremost factors is the email open rate.

If they don’t open it, they won’t read it.

If they don’t read, they don’t click your call-to-action button.

If they don’t click your call-to-action button, it brings down your click-through rate.

Hence, the most important step towards executing a successful email marketing campaign is, to improve or increase your email open rate.

5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022

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5 ways to make money with your blog

5 ways to make money with your blog

Blogging has gone mainstream years ago, but people still wonder how to make money with blogging in 2022.

One of the most popular ways of making money with your blog is by publishing AdSense advertisements.

There are many alternatives but setting up AdSense is not just easy, it is also trusted more because it is offered by an organization like Google.

Do I make money with my blog in 2022?

If yes, how, and how much?

Right now, at this moment, my primary source of income is writing content for my clients.

I’m not directly making money from my blog in 2022.

I’m planning to change that in near future, but as of now, I use my blog to get more work.

On an average my blog gets me work worth $3000 every month, but as I just said, in the coming months I plan to turn my blog as my main source of income.

I’m outsourcing my work to, on an average, 15 content writers these days but to make this proposition financially viable, I need to generate more work.

No, these 15 content writers are not working at the same time.

I work with whomever is available for the ongoing assignment.

My primary reason for outsourcing to other writers is that I want to have enough time to devote to my blog.

I haven’t been sufficiently able to grow my blog because most of my time is spent working on client assignments.

The problem with working on my own is that there is only up to a certain amount of work I can do and after that, I reach my limit.

For many years I have known how to make money with my blog, it is just that, I have been caught in a vicious loop.

Fortunately, now I have a few writers I can rely on.

Although in terms of quality I still need to be cautious and I need to carefully revise and go through the documents before I forward them to my clients, nonetheless, it saves me lots of time that I can then put into my blog.

Can any blog be used to make lots of money?

How much money you make with your blog depends on your topic.

Technology and digital marketing blogs make more advertising money than gardening and sewing blogs simply because the ads that are published are published on technology and digital marketing blogs are expensive per click.

I have read that blogs on highly focused medical conditions also make lots of money.

But as you will discover, publishing advertisements isn’t the only option to make money from your blog.

You can promote events.

You can sell books.

You can build your personal brand which in turn gets you speaking and networking opportunities.

How do you choose your blogging niche?

My personal advice would be, choose something that you love and you have got lots to talk about.

Don’t choose a niche simply because you think it will be profitable unless you have lots of money and you can hire writers who would be interested in the topic.

Keep in mind that unless you have lots of money, you will be working on your blog mostly by yourself.

Although blogging can be rewarding in the long run, for a few months or even for a year, you may need to work non-stop, really hard, before you can see some money coming in.

If you are not interested in the topic, you will very soon get discouraged.

You may see no traffic building for the first 4-5 months.

People give up.

Unless you are truly interested in sharing your knowledge and thoughts on a topic, it is practically impossible for you to continue publishing a blog on your own for a long time.

Therefore, carefully choose a topic.

Something on which you can write non-stop for months.

5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022

When blogging started in early 2000’s it was mostly a hobby.

In the beginning people were not using their blogs to make money.

People mostly promoted their business websites through publishing articles on article directories.

Though I was not aware of the concept of blogging, I knew that if I published lots of web pages under my domain it would help me generate traffic, so I did, and actually generated good traffic for my business.

Gradually people realized that Google ranked blog posts faster than it ranked the conventional pages.

The primary reason was that compared to the usual website, a blog is updated with a greater frequency.

Which means, there is more content to crawl, index and rank.

Also a blog is thematic – some blogs may have scores of, and hundreds of blog posts on the same or the similar topics.

This gives a blog topical depth, which is preferred by Google.

When traffic began to build, people began to see a moneymaking opportunity.

Most of the ways people were using to make money with their blogs are still valid in 2022.

This is because the companies (for example AdSense) that were used to make money also grew on the backs of many big blogs.

If you think that the opportunity of making money with your blog has come and gone, and by 2022, there is too much competition and too little interest, you may like to reconsider.

For example, when researching for this particular blog post, most of the blog posts and articles that come up on Google on the first or the second page, have been written in 2022.

I used my blog to generate traffic for my business website in 2008, and I am still using it.

Most of my work comes through my blog.

Hence, if you want to make money with your blog, the opportunity still awaits you.

Below I’m listing 5 ways you can make money with your blog in 2022.

On other blogs you may find 20 ways or even 50 ways, but they have simply inflated single topics into multiple subtopics.

The methods that I have listed below can help any blog make money provided you have chosen the right niche and you stick to your guns for a sufficient amount of time.

Generating traffic for business website

This is how I make money with my blog.

As of now I don’t make advertising or affiliate money.

If you see advertisements on this blog, it is a recent development.

I use my blog to generate traffic for my main website and then my main website generates work for me.

So far my blog has helped me maintain my search engine rankings.

Since my blog is under my main website domain, when it improves its search engine rankings, it also has a trickle-down effect on my main website.

Through improved search engine rankings of my blog, the SEO of my business web pages also improves.

Most of my clients for whom I write blog posts use their blogs to build targeted traffic or to simply have a blogging section because most contemporary websites have them these days.

Is this a good way of making money from your blog in 2022?

Surely, if you prefer that.

As I have mentioned above, most of my clients use their blogs to improve their search engine rankings.

In this sense, I have been using my blog to make money for the past 14 years.

Building a personal brand to make money with your blog in 2022

You can make money with your blog in 2022 by building your personal brand through it.

One of the best examples that comes to my mind is that of Seth Godin.

He is a bestselling author and a speaker.

He goes to conferences.

He gets many paid gigs for speaking in front of audiences.

He has published multiple books.

He has built his personal brand by sharing intelligent insights about doing business from his blog.

He posts a blog post every day, or at least, he was posting a blog post every day when I was regularly following him.

He was so particular that he never missed publishing a blog post even on Christmas eve.

To make money with your blog by building a personal brand requires immense thought leadership.

Therefore, if you are a consultant, speaker, or a coach, you can use your blog to build your personal brand which will generate unlimited moneymaking opportunities for you.

Publishing advertisements to make money from your blog

This is the commonest way of making money with your blog and people are still making lots of money through publishing advertisements.

The caveat is that you need lots of traffic.

You make decent money from programs like AdSense only if your blog gets more than 20,000 visitors every day.

The real money is made by blogs who get millions of visitors every month.

Again, it also depends on your topic.

Some years back I was publishing a technology blog and even with a traffic of 300-400 visitors per day, my blog was making $2-$3 dollars every day.

Sometimes, a single click on an AdSense advertisement can get you $1 and sometimes, it gets you just $0.01.

Hence, how much money you make through advertisement depends on your niche as well as the amount of traffic you can generate.

The easiest way of publishing advertisements is joining the AdSense program.

It also has a WordPress plugin that allows you to publish ads on your blog within a few hours.

Why I say within a few hours is that when you sign up and activate the ads, the AdSense algorithm analyzes existing content.

This blog post lists some AdSense alternatives that you can use on your blog to make more money.

Advertisements don’t have to be from third-party companies like AdSense.

Recently I was approached by a company to place their advertisement directly on my blog.

I’m not posting direct ads right now because I don’t have enough traffic to charge them decently.

Promoting affiliate products to make money from your blog

Affiliate links are unique links given to you by various merchant websites like Amazon.com.

You use the link on your website and when someone clicks the link, he or she goes to the merchant website, and buys the product represented by that link, you get a commission.

The commission is normally 10%-30%, depending on the affiliate scheme.

You can sell various items through your affiliate links such as subscription-based services, digital products, books, movie tickets, and conventional products from websites like Amazon.com and Shopify.

For example, if you have a blog on arthritis, you can have affiliate links for various arthritis-related products from Amazon.

Among bloggers, this is the second most favorite way of making money after publishing AdSense ads.

Some bloggers claim that promoting affiliate links makes them more money than publishing AdSense ads because affiliate links are better targeted.

Sponsored blog content to make money

This is another option I will be considering in near future.

When your blog builds up a decent traffic there are many businesses who would like to publish a sponsored blog post on your blog.

As the name goes, since it is a sponsored blog post, they are ready to pay you for publishing it.

Why do businesses want to publish sponsored posts?

They want exposure.

They want to associate their brand with a blog that is growing in popularity, or is already popular.

They want to improve their search engine rankings.

Why I’m more excited about this way of making money from my blog is that whereas advertising still doesn’t make me money, I already get proposals for sponsored blog posts.

But I’m going to wait.

You need to provide the screenshots of statistics of your traffic before you can tell people how much you are going to charge for publishing sponsored content.

My traffic isn’t much right now and I don’t want to charge too low for publishing sponsored content.

Nonetheless, I’m looking forward to such an opportunity.

If you write your own blog posts it means you are a prolific writer and you can charge additionally by writing the sponsored posts on your own instead of getting them written from other businesses.

These are the most prevalent ways of making money from your blog, in 2022, and beyond.

I must admit that publishing a successful blog isn’t as easy as it was when the blogging was just starting.

The competition is tough.

Almost every niche is already covered.

Top rankings have already been taken by big websites and blogs.

But then, almost every month I see a new blog emerging and becoming successful, despite tough competition.

Therefore, don’t let other successful blogs dissuade you from starting your own blog or using your existing blog to make money.

 

What is blog post introduction and how to write a great one?

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How to write a great blog post introduction

How to write a great blog post introduction

Just imagine: you have written a great blog post and it can help thousands of your readers.

But your introduction fails to capture the imagination of your readers and after reading the introductory sentences, your readers move on, missing on a great opportunity to learn what you have captured in your blog post.

When you visit some blogs you come across a very strong introduction.

The introduction is the first couple of sentences that are supposed to hook you and make you read the rest of the blog post.

Your opening sentences or your single opening sentence is the introduction of your blog post.

After your blog post main headline, it is the introduction that sells the idea of your blog post to your readers.

If your introduction fails to impress them, there is little chance they are going to read the rest of the blog post.

The 4 main ingredients of a blog post introduction are

  1. Grab the reader’s attention.
  2. Introduce the main points or the main proposition.
  3. Convey what to expect from the blog post.
  4. Address the concerns of the readers who are about to read the blog post.

In a blog post on the same topic (writing compelling intros for your blog posts) Brian Clark mentions copywriter Eugene Schwartz: he often spent an entire week on the first 50 words of his sales copy.

The headline and the opening paragraph.

Of course, as a professional content writer or copywriter it might be impractical for you to spend that much time on an introduction, but the moot point is, take your introduction seriously.

Whether your blog post is going to be read or not depends a lot on your introduction.

Again, what’s introduction?

Your blog post introduction is the first sentence or the first couple of sentences that draw people to your entire blog post.

Is your blog post introduction same as meta description?

Meta description is different.

Although, in terms of traffic from search engines, your meta description is as important as your blog post description.

Just as people read your introduction and then decide if you want to read the remaining blog post, the meta description appears in your search engine listings.

Meta description screenshot

Meta description screenshot

Your title along with the meta description compels people to click your link on search results and visit your website or blog.

The meta description appears in the source code of your blog post.

It is not visible when people visit your blog post.

People can only see your meta description either in search results, or if they view the source code of your blog post.

They can also see the meta description when you post your link on one of the social networking websites because this information is automatically extracted from your URL.

The blog post introduction on the other hand is the first sentence or the first paragraph.

It is a text that appears just beneath your headline.

In the screenshot below, the highlighted portion is the introduction of one of my blog posts.

Blog post introduction screenshot

Blog post introduction screenshot

Writing an effective blog post introduction that makes people read your entire blog post

Here are a few formats you can follow when writing an intro to your blog post.

Ask a question in the introduction

  • Want to write a great blog post introduction that your readers won’t be able to resist?
  • Want to write a sensational blog post introduction?
  • We want to learn how to write an irresistible blog post introduction?

These are a few examples of asking questions in the beginning of a blog post.

When people are reading your blog posts, they rarely answer a “no” to such a question.

For example, if you have been drawn to this blog post, you obviously want to write killer blog post introductions.

You want to learn how to write highly successful intros.

So, if I ask such a question in the beginning, there is a 99% chance you are going to say “yes” unless you are unsure of what you are trying to achieve here.

State a problem in the blog post introduction

  • Not many people are reading your blog posts? The problem might be in your introduction.
  • You might be losing a ton of readers because you’re not paying much attention to your blog post intro.
  • Just because not many people are reading your blog post, your search engine rankings might be tanking because they’re both related to each other.

In the intros mentioned above, I have stated some problems and you certainly want to find their solutions.

Most of the people who come to consume your content have problems to solve.

When in the into itself you mention the problem, it immediately gets the attention of your readers.

Their anticipation increases.

They expect to get answers from your blog post.

Start with a story narrative

Everybody loves to read a story.

Especially when people can relate to the story.

Here is a small example:

Peter had started his business with great anticipation.

He had built an awesome mobile app that enables people to publish microblog posts from mobile phone.

But nobody seems to want to download the mobile app?

In 6 months, only 30 people downloaded the mobile app and among them, 20 uninstalled it.

It has been a heartbreaking experience for Peter.

Then he realized something that would change the course of his entire marketing.

Soon, thousands of people would download his mobile app within a month.

Want to know how?

Read on.

You definitely want to read what happened next.

This is the story format of writing an introduction for your blog post.

Use statistics and numbers in your blog post introduction

  • WordPress users post around 70 million blog posts every month.
  • 71% WordPress blog posts are written in English.
  • There were 31.7 million bloggers in the United States in 2020.
  • A professional blogger spends on an average 6 hours on each post.

People love new data.

The data should be relevant and useful.

For example, the above-mentioned data would be relevant to a blog post promoting the advantages of blogging.

In the introduction itself they have learned something valuable.

Begin your blog post with a controversial statement

  • SEO might not be right for your business.
  • I love firing my clients.
  • I don’t care much about lead generation.

These can be controversial statements because almost everyone wants to improve his or her search engine rankings, and people obviously want new leads.

Hence, people would like to read why you are making such controversial statements.

Somewhere in their minds, they know that you are being ironic and within the blog post, you are going to prove yourself wrong.

Aside from these, you can use your introduction to take a stand.

You can use a quotation from a famous personality or a historic figure.

Many writers suggest that you should write your blog post introduction after writing the complete blog post.

By the time you have completed your blog post, you have a clear understanding of what your blog post represents and what it delivers.

You can sum up the essence of your blog post in the introduction.

You can create curiosity.

You can create controversy.

Whatever catches your fancy.

Otherwise, it depends on you whether you want to write the intro first or after you have written your blog post.

 

Are you creating these branding mistakes while creating your personal brand?

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Reputation is not personal branding, according to this Harvard Business Review article. Reputation is just a part of your personal brand.

Your personal branding is what you stand for, what decisions you make, what values you represent and who you are as a person.

Your personal brand differentiates you.

It makes you identifiable and recognizable.

Whereas your reputation might be on autopilot, and it might not be in your hand what people think of you, your personal brand is how you want people to see you.

To build a personal brand, you make a conscious effort to build an image that is a mix of your experience, your skills, your values, and what you deliver to people who come in contact with you.

How do you create your personal brand?

Decide what you want to be known for.

Have very clearly laid out goals.

Audit your existing brand – search yourself on the Internet and find out what people are saying about you, if at all.

This will give you an idea of how much effort you need to put in and what direction to follow.

Come up with a consistent strategy.

What branding mistakes could you be committing when creating your personal brand?

I came across this list of mistakes on this LinkedIn update and thought of creating a small blog post listing them here.

One branding mistake is pretending to be someone you are not.

What are your core values?

How do you define yourself?

Don’t deviate from your core values just to appeal to the crowd.

Stick to your personality and you will attract an appropriate audience.

The second mistake is not differentiating between marketing and personal branding.

Most of the personal branding is one-on-one engagement.

You build your personal brand by providing some sort of value to people through blogging, social media updates and videos.

Advertising and marketing don’t work in personal branding.

You can read about the remaining mistakes in the original post.

6 steps to writing the perfect blog post outline

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6 steps to writing the perfect blog post outline

6 steps to writing the perfect blog post outline

Do you first write an outline when writing a blog post or do you directly start writing the main piece?

Writing a blog post outline seems like an extra work, especially when you are not used to writing them.

Most content writers think that it is unnecessary to write an outline when you have got everything you need to write the blog post.

Do I write an outline before writing a blog post or web page?

Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

It depends on how deep the blog post or the web page goes.

If there are just 400-600 words, then I skip writing the outline when the message is quite straightforward.

If the topic is complicated with lots of information, then I certainly first create an outline and submit it to the client.

Having gone through the outline the client gets a basic idea of what I’m covering and what is the flow of my narrative.

It saves both of us lots of time of editing and revising.

The benefits of writing a blog post outline

Have you ever read blog posts like “Write a blog post in just one hour”?

While such blog posts have some good tips on how to write faster, it is only in the body text that they reveal that you must have an outline to be able to write a blog post in just one hour.

Aside from writing a blog post faster, here are some benefits of writing a blog post outline before working on the complete thing:

Writing an outline saves you time and effort in the long run

In many cases you spend more time revising and editing a blog post than initially writing it.

You may completely misinterpret the instructions sent by the client.

Personally, I have experienced that the problem is not with interpretation.

Often the clients fail to send the right specifications and only when they read the complete blog post they realize that it isn’t what they were looking for.

Most of the clients don’t even pay you extra for all the work you need to do just because they didn’t give you the right information.

An outline can help you in this regard.

Write an outline in such a manner that the client completely understands what is being represented through the blog post.

Even after that if there is a confusion, since the client has already approved the outline, in case you need to rework, you can demand extra money.

Writing an outline helps you organize your thoughts better

You want to give your best when you are writing a blog post whether you are writing it for yourself or your client.

You don’t want to miss important information.

You want to cover all the important points.

You want to research and include the right data.

You may also have in mind what images you want to use.

When you are writing an outline you will have a complete map of how to formulate your blog post and you won’t miss the important point.

You will also know in which direction your information must flow to make the right impact.

In the hubbub of writing the main blog post, you may miss these points.

Steps needed to write the perfect blog post outline

1. Write the main headline and the description

Main headline screenshot

Main headline screenshot

In this step you write the main headline, the HTML title, and the description of your blog post.

The main headline and the HTML title may be the same or different depending on your SEO and engagement needs.

The HTML title is what appears in search results as a hyperlink when your link appears for a search.

The main headline is the biggest font type text that appears at the top of your blog post.

Your main headline most probably appears with an H1 tag.

Again, I’m repeating that they can be same, or they can be different.

After that you write a small description of what your blog post stands for and what you’re going to deliver.

Additionally, you may also want to compile a list of keywords and longtail phrases that you would like to cover in the current blog post.

I’m interested in knowing the keywords not just for the purpose of improving rankings, but also to understand the language that people use when searching.

When using Google, people mostly use queries in their own language.

You may also like to read: How important are keywords when writing content?

These 4 pieces of information will give a solid direction to your entire outline.

2. Write down all possible subheadings

Subheadings screenshot

Subheadings screenshot

One under the other.

You write subheadings most probably with the H2 tag.

These are the subsections.

You can also call them subtopics.

These are the different subtopics that you would like to cover under the main headline.

Here comes the main information.

It is the subtopics or the subheadings that will tell you (and your client) what all you are going to cover in your blog post.

You may like to do some research on other websites and blogs to check what all subtopics they have covered.

The more subheadings you have, the longer will be your blog post.

Don’t cram your blog post needlessly.

But try to include as much useful information as possible.

Remember that your subheadings enable your readers to quickly skim through your content.

You may like to read How to use subheadings to make your writing more effective

Your subheadings help your readers decide whether they want to read their remaining text or not.

Your subheadings should be able to tell almost 50% of the story.

3. Write information under the subheadings

Information under the subheadings screenshot

Information under the subheadings screenshot

Now you can start adding information under the subheadings.

There is no need to write complete sentences.

Just write some introductory sentences on how you would like to describe individual subtopics.

You can even use simple bulleted lists to put in information under individual subheadings.

The more information you put, the more comprehensive will be your outline and the faster you will be able to complete your blog post, with greater accuracy.

4. Prepare images

Although when I’m writing blog posts, I prepare images once I have completed the blog post, sometimes it is better to decide what images you are going to use during the outlining phase itself.

This way when you are writing and publishing the completed blog post, you will be able to work faster because you will already have the images with you.

Unless the client is paying for images, you will be getting them from your client.

This is a good way of getting the client involved in the blog writing process and increase his or her stakes.

5. Gather data when preparing the outline for your blog post

Data helps you build your authority.

In this section of creating outline for your blog post do research and find authoritative information that you can use in your blog.

People prefer numbers rather than estimates.

For example, instead of saying there are millions of blogs managed by WordPress, it is better to say that right now 43.2% of all websites on the Internet use WordPress as back-end (source).

Instead of saying that email is still widely used, you can say that 99% of email users check their email everyday (source).

When doing research, just make sure that you get the information from authoritative websites.

How much research you do depends on how much time you can afford to send on a particular blog post.

For example, if your client is paying per word, it doesn’t make sense to spend two hours on a 600-word blog post when the client is not going to pay you for the extra hours you spend researching.

On the other hand, if you are researching for your own blog, make sure you spend ample amount of time while creating the outline itself.

6. Consider, what, who, where, why, and how of your blog post in the outline

Every blog post must answer the following questions:

  • What is the purpose of writing your blog post?
  • Who is your target reader?
  • Where will your blog post be read the most – devices, regions, and platforms?
  • Why must people read your blog post?
  • How should your readers react after reading your blog post?

Whether you want to write a blog post outline before writing the actual blog post depends on your preference.

It is not written in stone.

It is just that, it helps if you plan and if you already have the information.

Personally, I have seen that writing an outline for a blog post or a web page sometimes works and sometimes it can be a needless distraction.

You need to develop your own system.

You can decide to write an outline before writing the actual blog post or you can straightaway write your blog post – whatever suits you.