How To Write A Blog Post 

Your web content is the engine that drives your website, and your blog is at the heart of your content. Your blog is your most powerful source of inbound traffic. You’ll use it to become recognized as a tight leader in your field.

But where do you start? 

Learning how to write a blog post is the foundation of your content creation. It is the one area of your website that is infinitely able to grow and expand. Blogs remain a top-tier inbound lead generator, so you need to learn to write them properly. 

Let’s take a look at exactly how I write blog posts and the anatomy of blog posts. Consider this your “writing a blog post guide.”

What Is A Blog Post?

It may seem common sense, but there is still confusion about what a blog post actually is. While there are no hard-and-fast rules about what exactly constitutes a blog post, the general consensus is that a blog post is any news article, piece, or guide that gets published in the blog section of a website. 

Blog posts generally range in length from 600 words (which is pretty short) to over 2,000 words (which would be pretty long). Blog posts usually include images and can also have embedded videos or audio files, infographics, or even interactive charts. 

I’ve seen a bunch of blog posts that also include tables of relevant data. 

Also, blog posts can include a bunch of different formats, some of which are:

• Listicles

• How-to guides

• Case studies

• Content hubs

• News (aka, the typical blog post)

Choosing A Topic

You will probably get a little overwhelmed when you are gearing up to write your first blog post. Like…where do you even start?

Well, if it’s your own personal blog or one for your own business, you can write about anything you want. Anything. There are seven billion people on the planet, and the odds are that even the weirdest ideas and hobbies have a few thousand fans. 

Now, if you partake in client work as I do, your options are either going to be a lot more limited (to whatever niche the site works in), or they might even just give you a topic and sometimes even the outline. 

Conduct Keyword Research

Identifying the right keywords for your content is one of the most important parts of the content creation process. Think about it this way: if you are writing articles, but you aren’t tailoring them to the audience that you want to read your content. 

See, your content needs to be aimed toward specific audiences. You need to have a battle plan for who you want to see your content, and you specify exactly how those leads will turn into conversions. 

Your blog is a massive lead magnet. When all is said and done, it will have pages and pages of articles, a lot of which will look and read almost exactly the same. You will talk about the same thing over and over and over until you think you can’t talk about it anymore. 

This isn’t to say that you regurgitate the exact same thing over and over, but instead, you must find different keywords from different angles. Because, at its most basic, it is a chess match. It is all about strategy. Finding the right position for your pawns to be in so you can use your queen. 

Keywords are exactly how you target your content to bring in the right kind of prospects. The wrong keywords on the right content is still wrong. The keywords have to match the search intent. 

And the cool thing is that you generally don’t have to use paid tools to get a good handle on keywords. I have found the Ahrefs Chrome extension to be very useful, although you probably will need some sort of paid tool to dive deep.             

How The Hell Do I Do That?

My first stop is plane ol’ Google. Learn to master the art of Googling, and think about it like you’re a potential customer. What are your ideal customer’s pain points? Pain motivates people more than any other single issue.

Create The Outline

Alright, so you have created a basic list of keywords for your article. Now, you don’t need a bunch of keywords and key phrases; just focus on maybe 5-6 keywords per article. 

Your outline is the lifeblood of your writing. It is a framework that you will use over and over again. The outline is constructed using HTML tags, starting with the H1 tag and then sub-headings H2 as far down the rabbit hole as they want. 

I personally seldom find any purpose in breaking down the headings below an H4, but I have used H5 and H6 once or twice.  

Write The Body Of The Article

Alright, so you have gotten your keywords, and you have built an outline. Some of your headings should include keywords in them, but make sure they flow and sound natural. 

One of the biggest takeaways from Google’s algorithms is that it prizes authentic human writing. Writing material that sounds unique and is distinctly yours is going to be at a premium moving into this new year.

So, you’ve got a keyword-optimized outline, and now you are just kinda filling in the blanks. Remember, you’re not trying to keyword stuff here. You need to write a good article first and sew keywords into it second.

You Can Write The Intro Before the Body, or After; It Doesn’t matter

I read in a competitor’s article that you should do the body first and then the introduction and conclusion later. I don’t do that, but you can if you want to. 

Source Images

Images are an important part of any blog post. Sometimes, it’s just a simple stock image or two or your own images. 

Surfer SEO creates an entire outline of phrases, paragraphs, minimum headings, and images, all based on what the competitors have done. At about $140 a month, it is a pricey tool, but it is also one of the best and certainly most user-friendly tools on the market.

Proofread that sucker

Once you have written the body, written the intro and conclusion, and added images, you are ready to read over the body for errors. This is the part that has gotten me in the most trouble over the years because I am sometimes not super-thorough. 

So be sure to read it completely, preferably twice, but at a bare minimum once. Reading it aloud has proven to be a good way to catch errors, so just take a few minutes and read it aloud. It is free, and it works exceptionally well. 

Hit publish!

And now the conclusion: press publish. 

It has to go live, and there is no reason to sit around waiting. So go read it over from cover to cover, and stop along the way to digest what you have read. 

If it all checks out, press publish. 

Parting thoughts 

Blog posts are the foundation of your written content, so learning to write them properly is a priority. But here’s the thing: don’t let inexperience keep you from starting now. If you don’t publish your content, nobody will ever will.

Of course, if you have more funds than time, you should consider hiring a professional writer to curate your blog.

If that’s you, just click the link, and we’ll talk.