Tag Archives: Blog Writing

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

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

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.

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

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.

Why is it difficult to publish a blog regularly?

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Why is it difficult to write a blog post regularly

You want to, you need to, publish a blog regularly for multiple reasons.

When you publish a blog regularly, you regularly engage your visitors. You improve your search engine rankings. You get to demonstrate and share your knowledge. Your readers have a reason to come back to your website repeatedly. You have fresh content to share on social media websites and other platforms.

Most of the clients who approach me to write for them regular blog posts are looking to increase their organic traffic. This is the best form of traffic. Once your blog post begins to appear in search results, you don’t pay for every click. It is high quality traffic. It is free after you have recovered the cost of publishing the blog post.

How often should you publish a blog post?

Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Websites like Hubspot recommend that businesses that publish 2-3 blog posts every week get 13X more traffic than businesses that publish 1-2 blog posts every 15 days. Ideally, you should aim for at least one or two blog posts every week. Again, it depends on what results you seek.

Let’s say you want to improve your search engine rankings in the coming two months. Then, I would recommend you publish a decently long blog post – 1000-1500 words – every day.

I have personally experienced good success by publishing even 400-500 words every day for a couple of months. Rankings improved. Targeted traffic improved. New content got crawled faster.

Why do businesses find it difficult to publish blog posts regularly?

Many reasons. You run out of ideas and topics. You feel demotivated by the lack of success that is hard to come due to competition and millions of web pages and blog posts being added to search engines and social media platforms every day. Writing every day can be a Herculean undertaking.

Some of the biggest challenges faced by individuals and businesses wanting to publish blog posts every day include

Lack of interesting topics.
Not knowing where to start and where to end.
Not enough time due to the core professional obligations (you may be a lawyer, a designer, a programmer or an architect and writing is not your main occupation).
Not having a content calendar or a clearly-defined plan.
Inability to come up with original content.
A sense of boredom – initially you may be full of excitement but as blogging becomes a usual business chore, it tends to become a boring activity.
Not knowing what to prioritize – writing what you love or writing what your core audience finds useful.
Not getting enough traffic – organic traffic doesn’t come in a few days. It may take a couple of months before the traffic begins to trickle.
Finding the perfect niche – if you don’t know your niche you are simply beating around the bush and wasting your time and precious resources, and this further leads to inertia.
The absence of the writer’s discipline – writing is a discipline and only professional writers seem to have it.
Not working with a professional writer – since writing is better done by a professional writer it is better to assign the task of writing a regular blog post to a professional blog writer.

How to make it easier and more profitable to publish a blog regularly?

You have two choices: become a prolific writer yourself or assign the task to someone who himself or herself is a prolific writer, preferably, a professional writer or content writer.

Why is it so?

A professional content writer is a dedicated writer who is everyday writing blog posts for different businesses. For a professional content writer or blog writer, writing is not a chore, it is a professional undertaking, it is a livelihood. Hence, the interest that a professional content writer shows in your blog writing, it may be difficult for you to show.

For your blog to be successful it needs to be relevant, regular and effective. Day after day it must deliver value. Your visitors must have a strong reason to come back to your website and check out your blog.

If your blog is not delivering value, it will fail to draw targeted traffic.

The problem with organic search engine rankings is that everything is interconnected. It is like an old motorbike – you need to keep kicking until the engine cranks up and your bike starts.

Somehow you need to make people come to your blog and enable them to stay there. If you don’t have quality content, people won’t stay and Google has a way of finding that out.

Here is an example:

You find one of my links on Google and come to my website. You don’t stay even for a few seconds. You go back to Google and start checking out other links. What does it tell Google?

It tells the Google algorithm that you didn’t find useful information on my website and consequently, the current rankings that the link enjoys should be degraded for the keyword that you used.

On the other hand, if you stay on my website for 3-4 minutes and you read a major portion of my web page or blog post, it tells Google that my link contains useful information and as a result, my rankings for that keyword for that link further improve.

These attributes for a successful blog can be delivered by a professional content writer or a professional blog writer. A professional content writer delivers

High quality blog posts regularly.
Quality research.
Engaging writing.
Publishing of your blog posts as per your calendar.
Targeted topics.
Search engine optimized content.

5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts

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5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts.

Writing an engaging blog post isn’t very easy.

Online readers have really short attention spans. Grabbing their attention, and holding on to it throughout the post is very difficult.

In this post, we are going to be looking at 5 tips that you can keep in mind when writing a blog post to make sure that it is interesting and engaging.

5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts

1. Do Proper Research

You can’t attract readers if you don’t know what you are talking about.

Take an example.

If someone was to say:

“The world probably has a lot of countries. There may be more than 180 but I’m not sure.”

It would sound horrible. No one would trust it. No one would rely on it and no one would quote it.

On the other hand, if someone was to say:

“The world has 197 countries. From these, 193 are members of the UN.”

It would sound way better. Even if it’s not true, it sounds like it because it’s said with determination and confidence.

And if you want to sound confident and determined, you have to have a proper command on the subject matter. You need to be so learned in your topic that you should be able to state facts and figures related to it without any hesitation.

When you want to write on something, take some time out beforehand and dedicate a session solely to research. Look at reliable articles, research papers and books on your topic.

Always remember to mention statistics and figures, and to link them back to their original source.

2. Focus on Making the Beginning Engaging

In writing, the old adage ‘First impression is the last impression’ holds a very accurate application.

If you manage to create an engaging and interesting introduction, you will be able to hook your readers and get them to read till the end of the post.

This will mean that if you’ve placed any links or sponsored elements in your blog, they will be more likely to appear in front of your readers.

Similarly, you will also increase the chances of your readers to click on any internal links that you may have left in between your content.

Here are some points that you can keep in mind to come up with an engaging introduction:

Discuss the main concept or topic of your content
Don’t dillydally. Get to the point without putting in a lot of fluff
Start with a relatable question
Keep it short and sweet

3. Break Your Content Down in Headings and Sub-Headings

By breaking your content down in headings and sub-headings, you will be able to make it easier to navigate and skip through.

If there is a reader who wants to just read a particular part of your post and not the whole of it, they can easily skip to their desired part and then leave. But, if you don’t add headings and sub-headings, your reader will get annoyed scanning through the content.

Other than that, headings and sub-headings can make your content appear less like a wall of text. And here is something you should know about walls of text.

If someone has written some highly interesting and information content, but without dividing and splitting it properly, it will appear boring to the readers.

But on the other hand, if the content itself is not very informative, but it is properly split up in headings, sub-headings, sections and bullet points, it will look interesting to the readers.

4. Make Sure Your Content is Unique

Plagiarized and copied content is, to be a little dramatic, the bane of reader-engagement. This problem can occur with writers who just take all their information from a single popular source on the internet without diversifying their research.

Plagiarized content, especially if it is taken from a popular source, can stick out to the readers, and it can easily be spotted.

However, there can be a lot of writers who don’t intentionally copy stuff from other sources. But even these types of writers can have trouble with plagiarism by committing it accidentally.

To make sure that there is no plagiarism, of any kind whatsoever, in your content, you should use a plagiarism checker.

Plagiarism checkers usually work by scanning the given text against online sources to see if there are any matches between them. This can help you easily see if there is any accidental duplication in your content from other sources on the internet.

5. Add Visuals and Graphics

There are few things that make written content more engaging than some visuals and graphics.

The logic behind adding visuals and graphics is the same as we discussed in the heading dealing with headings and sub-headings: they stop your content from looking like a giant wall of text.

But, here’s the thing.

While it is commendable and good for your content’s engagement to have images in it, some writers can go a little over-board. They can either start adding images at every other point in the blog post, which can make it impossible to peruse.

Or they can start adding images that have nothing to do with the content at hand.

This sort of excess or irrelevancy in the added visuals can, far from making the content engaging, take away whatever little engagement it may have previously had.

Conclusion

If you are writing for an online audience, you should understand well that your readers will not bother entertaining a dull and boring blog post.

In this post, we looked at some tips and steps that you can follow to make your content look interesting and gripping to your readers.

To sum it up, you should take care to do proper research before sitting down to write your blog post. Having thorough command and knowledge over your subject can make you sound authoritative.

Then, you should work on creating the beginning of the post interesting in order to hook the attention of your readers. You should also break your content up in headings and sub-headings so that it is easier for users to navigate through it.

Uniqueness is also necessary for making your content engaging, so you should be sure to check your final draft for duplication using a plagiarism checker.

And last but not least, you should take care to add visuals and graphics in your content.

5 types of content that I write

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5 types of content that I write

Although I have extensively explained on my website that being a writer I can write on a wide choice of topics and realms, many clients often ask me exactly what I do and what sort of writing I provide professionally.

I have spread my net quite wide in the previous years and I think this has been a mistake. There are many writing activities that are time wasting in terms of generating income. For example, email writing. Most of the clients think of email as number of words but sometimes, more effort is needed in writing a business email than writing a blog post. I’m gradually moving towards the payment model that is based on the effort and expertise rather than merely the number of words.

Broadly, I’m writing content for 5 types of requirements these days. I’m explaining below

1. Blog writing

I love writing blogs because it is mostly linear writing without fluff. It is educational. It is informative. It imparts value.

Although blogging requires research, in most of the cases clients these days send their own outline and sometimes even research material because I charge extra for that. As long as they are paying for my time, I don’t even mind extensive researching.

Although many clients hire me to write “SEO blog posts” I focus more on quality and relevance rather than simply stuffing keywords. This is primarily the reason why I charge slightly more than other content writers who don’t mind simply writing for SEO.

2. Web page writing

This involves writing for the homepage and other pages on the website such as the services page, the company profile, the about us page, or the product descriptions.

Web page writing is quite important, and I charge more than I charge for blog writing. This is where conversion happens. This is where you tell your visitors whether they should do business with you.

Web page writing or website writing is a mix of content writing and copywriting. You inform, educate, but more than that, you sell.

3. Email writing

As I have explained above, I’m shifting the focus to quality rather than the number of words. I like writing emails because I love to communicate. I can write convincingly. I can stick to the point. I can communicate what the client wants to communicate to his or her client or customer. The only precondition is, the client must be able to tell me what he or she exactly wants to communicate.

4. Case studies

A case study is a detailed examination of some problem a customer or client had been facing and how that problem was solved by a service or are product. Detailed method is described, including technologies.

A case study is like a story. You tell about a customer or a client and what problems he or she had been going through. Then how those problems were solved through your effort or through your product. It uses engaging storytelling to weave a narrative around what you offer.

5. Landing pages

Landing pages are very focused. Unlike the usual web page or the blog post page of a website, a landing page has a single objective – to prompt the viewer to take a particular action. This action might be buying a product, or a book, or subscribing to a mailing list.

Landing pages are used for PPC and email marketing campaigns. People are driven to landing pages by promoting the link to them. For example, if you want to draw people through Google AdWords campaigns or Facebook campaigns or even email marketing campaigns, you use a landing page.

Landing page is mostly copywriting.

Other than these five categories, I have also been writing e-books for some clients, but mostly it is blogging, website writing and landing pages.

How to start blogging right now

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You can start a blog right now.

Blogging has immense benefits. It can improve your search engine rankings. It can build you a platform that can get you customers and clients. It increases your visibility. It helps you establish yourself as an authority in your field.

But why do most of the people find it difficult to start a blog?

What I have found is, most of the people find blogging intimidating in terms of time and cost.

This is because they do not see their blog as a platform that they can use to communicate their thoughts and share their wisdom and knowledge. They see it as a tool that can help them improve their search engine rankings.

Since they are focused on improving their search engine rankings, they get bogged down when they observe other blogs.

Information can empower you, but it can also mentally stunt you.

Don’t try to do what other blogs are doing

Before starting a blog, they visit multiple blogs. They observe how individuals and businesses are publishing their blog. They see that the blogs that do well on search engines and social media are very long, very well written, and well structured.

“Will I be able to achieve such a standard?” they end up thinking.

I mean, before starting a blog on search engine optimization, do you really want to do what Search Engine Land is doing?

Before starting a general interest blog, do you really want to do what Buzzfeed is doing?

Before starting a blog on content marketing or copywriting, right now, in terms of manpower and budget, can you really do what blogs like Copyblogger and Content Marketing Institute are doing?

No.

This is how you can start your blog right now

Complete your WordPress setup (or get it completed by your web designer). Install a basic, functional theme, but from WordPress (because they are search-engine-optimized by default).

Then start publishing small blog posts. You can write just one paragraph? Then just write one paragraph.

A blog post is not a bullet or an arrow that cannot be recalled.

You can always update older blog posts. You can always add new content. You can always add new images and new links. You can add new data as you come by it.

Right now, the main stress should be the building blocks.

Here is what I would do:

Install the blog and do the basic setup including a clean theme.
Come up with a title that genuinely represents what you intend to publish on your blog post. Do not use a confusing title. Create a title in such a manner that it exactly represents what you intend to write, no matter how “average” it seems.
Write it. Publish it.
Submit it to Google Search Console.
Do not worry about how well it is going to do on Google. Not right now.

Do steps 2-5 everyday.

Don’t worry about the length of your blog post. Don’t worry about publishing 1000 words or 800 words or 400 words. Don’t worry about images.

Make sure you have good titles and topics to cover. Then, even if you can write 100 words or 200 words, write them, and publish them. Then make sure that you submit the newly generated link to Google Search Console.

I know. No matter how good your intentions are, ultimately, you want to start a blog because you want to generate organic search engine traffic for your business. There is nothing wrong in that.

But atrophying your effort or postponing the launch of your blog just because you want to cater to certain parameters does not exactly help your cause.

Shorter blog posts may not do well on search engines compared to highly popular blogs in your niche, but they don’t stop search engine crawlers from crawling and indexing your website, which is more important.

Why?

Unless you are publishing 3-4 blog posts every day, if your domain name is new and if Google hasn’t yet indexed it, it may take anywhere between two or three months for Google to even start crawling your content.

So why waste all that time? You may not get higher search engine rankings right now, but at least a pattern will be set.

By the time you are ready to publish bigger blog posts, the crawling and indexing process will start and your more comprehensive content will be found by Google much faster.