How to Write a Blog Post With Ease The 5 Steps to Writing More Engaging Content

If you’re curious how to write a blog post, you’re in the right place! Follow our five easy steps below and be sure to download our interactive Better Blogging Worksheet for even more help in writing the best blogs!

We all get stage fright at some point. Maybe it’s public speaking or perhaps it’s a fear of heights. The fact is that no one is impervious to fear’s grip. In this industry, we often see people afraid of writing. It could be as big as a blog post or as short as a photo caption. Simply being asked to compose words into a sentence makes them feel uneasy. Maybe because, unless you enjoy writing, business blogging might seem uninteresting, time consuming, and difficult.

Small businesses should know how important the process of blogging is to the success of their marketing efforts. Without a blog, they’ll find themselves experiencing a number of problems such as poor SEO, low promotional content for social, reduced trust and thought leadership with leads and customers, and fewer pages on which to share calls-to-action.

As difficult as it may seem to get over a fear of writing, it doesn’t have to be that hard. Having a process to follow when writing a simple blog post can make it much more manageable. If businesses find themselves struggling to write their next blog post and getting over the fear of picking up a pen (or laptop), we recommend following the steps below to ensure success.

Before you start writing your blog post, make sure you have a clear understanding of your target audience. Visualize where the person reading your blog post might be and what they hope to get out of reading it. What will resonate most with them and their personality? This is where creating your buyer personas comes in handy. Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests while you’re coming up with a topic for your blog post.

For instance, if your readers are millennials looking to start a business, you likely don’t need to talk about getting started in social media — most already know how to do this well.

Once the audience has been selected, it’s time to build out the “why I should care” by writing out three or more arguments (or paragraphs) that validate why someone might care about your topic. How important is it to this audience? Why might they choose to click on this title and engage in your content? If you’re having trouble answering this question, it’s probably because it isn’t the right topic or audience.

Having three or more concrete arguments will launch you into defining an effective outline and body for the post.

Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information — for the reader and the writer. The trick is to organize the info in a way so readers (and the writer) aren’t intimidated by length. This organization can take on multiple forms including sections, lists, and tips. If you know your topic is going to cover a lot of material, break up sections into headers and sub-sections that make it easy to flow through reading.

For instance, instead of rambling on for 5+ paragraphs about content management systems (CMS), you might break it out into sections like:

• What is a Content Management System?
• Why is it important?
• How to Select a Content Management System
• Top Rated Content Management Systems

The next step is actually writing the content. Now that you have your outline, you’re ready to fill in the blanks. Use your outline as a guide and provide support for the headers and subheadings. Write about what you already know, and if necessary, conduct additional research to gather more information, examples, and data to back up your points. The first pass at filling in the details should include as much information as you have to support your view and engage your audience.

From there, you’ll want to go back through and edit the information. This will include checking for grammar, spelling, and cutting down on extra noise that doesn’t fully support the topic. Tools like Microsoft Word and Google Docs automatically include spell check, but if you need help with grammar, look into online tools like Grammarly.

As a final step in writing, you need to make it applicable to readers so they have a takeaway. Give your readers some direction on how they can put your blog post into action. Take it from theoretical to applicable with a call-to-action or link to connect with your team.

Everyone likes to start blog writing by creating catchy titles and subtitles, but all we end up doing is halting our progress before it’s even begun. Save this for the end. You’ll find it’s much easier to come up with the titles once you’ve filled out the other elements. In fact, you might find your witty titles and subtitles in the copy you just wrote.

And finally, be sure to mix high volume keywords into your witty title. This will make Google happy and increase your chances of getting your blog post found in search results.