Would you like to start a blog but not sure where to start with writing your first article? Perhaps you haven’t written a blog post in a while and need to get back into the habit. Writing a killer blog article can be difficult if you are not used to writing about a topic or haven’t had to since school.
For me, I went straight from writing essays at university to writing blog posts for The Content Marketing Academy so I found it easy to switch up my style of writing and produce two articles a week. If you want to know how I do it here is my recipe for writing a killer blog post, and how to make sure your audience notice.
I start by writing down what I already know about the topic of my blog. So if the blog is about the pros and cons of content marketing, from my experience I already know some of them, so I make a note using Evernote. To confirm what I already know and to find other information that might be good to include, I then use Google to search for the topic. So in this case I would type “pros and cons of content marketing”. From this I would look at some website and copy the URL to my notes and take down any information I don’t have that I want to include.
Once I have gathered all the information I feel I need to start writing, I do just that, start writing. I usually have a structure planned out. So I will have an introduction, maybe 4 or 5 sub-headings and sometimes a conclusion. And we always end our articles with a “Your Turn” section as a call to action to get the readers involved.
Starting writing may seem like the most daunting part of producing a blog post but I find that if you start with the parts you find easiest to write (not the introduction) then soon enough you have a full article. I usually look through the sub-headings I have and starting writing under the one I know I have lots to say about.
At this point I am not thinking too much about what I am writing, I am just getting my thoughts out as they come to me.
If I have been working on an article for a couple of hours I usually like to take a break from it at this point. If not I find that it can suck the life out of your creativity, and you can end up hating what you have written and delete something that is pretty good. If I have written an article in the morning, I will come back to it in the afternoon or even the next day, depending on if I feel like working on it. The important thing is to write and work on blog posts when you want to not when you have to, otherwise it takes the pleasure out of writing.
This app has changed the way I write and made my writing better. Before I started using this app, I used to write long sentences and use obsolete words. The Hemmingway app spots sentences that are hard to read, words or phrases that can be simpler and the use of a passive voice.
For me, I usually get Chris or Tammie to proof read my articles. Having someone else read your article can be beneficial as they can not only spot spelling and grammar mistakes, but can read it from the audiences perspective. They can also tell if what you have said you are going to write about, matches what you have actually written.
Once the article has been proof read and is ready to go, the next thing I do is to create a new post in WordPress. Adding in the main body of text, title and adjusting the SEO information until WP gives me the green “good” for SEO check. I add a feature image, usually from iStock photos, external links to resources I have used and internal links to articles that are related to what I am writing about. Adding internal links is great to get people to read some of your previous articles and keep them on you website for longer.
Related article – SEO for small business owners
When I am happy that it looks good in WP, I get someone to check it over again. This time checking links, images and skimming the words to double check no spelling or grammar mistakes were missed.
Now it is ready to publish. Depending on when I last published an article I either publish straight away or have it scheduled to be published later on in the week.
Steps 1 to 8 are half the work. Step 9 is the other half. They say you should spend as much time promoting an article as you do writing it so that means you need to get your article out there not just once but multiple times. So I buffer my new article to go out the very day I publish it on all available social media channels we have and then schedule it to go out the next day on the same channels. I then schedule the post to go out the following week on only a few selected channels, usually just Twitter as with people’s news feeds having so much content on it and constantly refreshing, your blog post can get lost in the noise everyone else is making.
Throughout my 3 month (ish) internship with Learning Everyday I have written 22 blog articles for The Content Marketing Academy and Learning Everyday. That’s over 24,000 words and around 100 hours work. So that is over 1000 words per article, which when I found this out, surprised me as I struggled sometimes at university to write 2000 word essays. It just goes to show that if you are writing about something you like and know alot about, it comes naturally.
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