How To Write Effective Blog
Writing a blog post is a little like driving; You can study the highway code or read articles telling you how to write a blog post for months; however, nothing can truly prepare you for the real thing. Meanwhile, getting behind the wheel and hitting the open road is a vastly different experience. In fact, it’s the best way to learn. Consequently, hands-on practice is essential for mastering any skill, whether it’s driving or writing. Or something.
“Wait for it… wait for it… BASS DROP.”
Now that I’m done thoroughly mangling that vague metaphor, let’s get down to business. You know you need to start blogging to grow your business, but you don’t know how. In this post, I’ll show you how to write a great blog post in five simple steps that people will actually want to read. Ready? Let’s get started.
How to Write a Blog Post in Five Easy Steps [Summary]:
Now let’s review each step in more detail.
How to Write a Blog Post, Step 1: Planning
First, a disclaimer – the entire process of writing a blog post often takes more than a couple of hours, even if you can type eighty words per minute and your writing skills are sharp. From the seed of the blog post idea to finally hitting “Publish,” you might spend several days or maybe even a week “writing” a blog post, but it’s important to spend those vital hours planning your post and even thinking about your post (yes, thinking counts as working if you’re a blogger) before you actually write it.
Does your blog post have enough circles and crosses?
Long before you sit down to put digital pen to paper, you need to make sure you have everything you need to sit down and write. Many new bloggers overlook the planning process, and while you might be able to get away with skipping the planning stage, doing your homework will actually save you time further down the road and help you develop good blogging habits.
Write Your Headline [2]
Here’s why copy editors, not reporters, wrote the headlines. Copy editors were responsible for designing the pages, and only they knew how much space would be allotted for a headline. Would the headline stretch the width of the page (six columns, at the time)? Or would it have to fit in three or four lines in just one column? Maybe two lines (decks, in newspaper-ese) and three columns?
Now throw type size into the mix. The bigger the letters, the fewer characters fit in the space. Part of the copy editor’s craft was learning to distill an article’s essence and make sure it caught the reader’s attention while constrained by space and type size. Oh, and by the way, don’t make the headline too short, and don’t end a line with a preposition.
Need More Space? It’s the Internet
Enter the internet, where there’s really no such thing as a space limitation, except in the length of Google’s search engine result titles. Now, you can focus on just the headline without worrying about fitting it into one column or 12. The critical criteria now? Will it attract attention and does it have a keyword or two to satisfy the search engines? Whether it fits is no longer part of the equation.
I get why many marketers encourage you to start with the headline before writing any article or “content.” There’s freedom in creating a clever headline and then trying to write an article to match. And the headline-first approach can help you stay focused.