Your Complete Guide on How To Write a Blog

If you’re looking to write a blog, the first thing you need to determine is its purpose.

• If you are writing for yourself, this how-to might be useful, but really, you can write however you would like! You can use this guide to help create something that might be easier for someone to find in a search engine, but you should just focus on what makes you happy. After all, if you have something interesting to say, it might resonate with others.
• If you are writing for your business, you should be following SEO best practices to get the most out of your content. You may want to consider pulling some of the steps from this guide.

What Is the Value of a Good Blog?

If you’re writing for yourself, it’s up to you what the value is. If people think what you have to say is interesting, then it is possible to put ads on your site, get affiliate links, or try other ways to earn a little extra income on the side.

If you’re writing for businesses, blogs are an invaluable part of your content marketing strategy. A good, strategic blog can:

• Bring relevant traffic to your site
• Increase rankings on Google and other search engines
• Guide people further down your marketing funnel
• Increase your brand awareness and authority

Now that you know the value, it’s time to get writing (or at least, start the research).

1. Pick a Topic

Picking a topic is the first step. When writing for businesses, you’ll want to find a topic that’s relevant and useful for your audience. There are a number of ways to find the right topic, and you don’t necessarily have to use a paid tool to do it. Here are a few ways to generate ideas.

Do Keyword Research

Keyword research is SO important because the most value you can get out of your writing is to create something that people are looking for.

A good way to think of it is: If no one is looking for what you’re writing about, you won’t be found (at least without promoting yourself). Not all tools require money, in fact, keyword research can be something as simple as seeing what shows up when you search your topic on Google.

You can also look at “People also ask” on your search. “How do you write a blog for beginners?” would be a perfect blog topic! This also makes it more specific (or as we call it, a “long-tail keyword,” which means there may be less search volume for the topic and less competition too.

Ask Your Audience

While you can’t always ask your audience if you don’t have regular readers already, you can rely on your audience to build a content strategy. Ask your followers on social media what they would like to see from you!

Blogs around topics that people aren’t looking for won’t necessarily get found on Google. However, that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable. With the right promotion strategies, you can get your blog seen by the right people.

Brainstorm Titles

Some people like to write the title last, but I personally like to get a base of what I’m expecting to write first. For example, when I first came up with this topic, I started with “How To Write a Blog.” Sometimes, a good brainstorm session can help you take the base of a topic and find a new angle. It might also give you some inspiration for future posts.

2. Start Writing

Blogs most often follow one of two formats:

• The five paragraph essay
• The reverse pyramid

I personally prefer to write in the five paragraph essay format, which consists of:

• An introduction
• A body
• A conclusion or call-to-action (CTA)

You want to draw someone’s attention with the introduction, keep them interested in the body, and guide your reader to take action after they’ve finished reading. Here is a more thorough overview of what goes into each piece.

Introduction

The introduction of your blog should bring any context the reader might need before they dive into the topic. Depending on how you’d like to organize your blog, it can be long, it can be short, but what’s important is that it’s compelling enough for your audience to KEEP READING.

Good strategies to build the perfect introduction are:

• Lead with a question
• Tell a story
• Use a quote
• Make a bold statement
• Offer a statistic

Once you’ve given the context of what your blog is about, who it’s for, and what someone should expect by reading it, it’s time to go into the body.

Body

The body of your blog should be the bulk of your writing. It can be as long or short as you’d like it to be, but a good rule of thumb is that longer content often performs better. That’s not to say all longer content will automatically rank. Instead, think of it this way: your goal should be to discuss a topic with as few words as possible. No more, no less.

If your blog is intended to be online, something crucial is that writing for the web is MUCH different than writing for an essay. Paragraphs shouldn’t be five to seven sentences, they might be just three to four lines. No one likes a big block of text, so while you’re writing out the body of your blog:

• Use headers that inform your readers what they can expect to learn in the section.
• Break up large paragraphs with lists, images, and line breaks.
• Stay on topic. While answering similar questions related to the topic you’re writing about is good practice, don’t shift your blog from one topic to a completely different one.

Conclusion/CTA

Finish out your blog with a conclusion that leaves the readers with your final thoughts and an action they can take. Potential calls to action you can try vary based on what you’re writing for. Again, if you’re writing for yourself, it may require a completely different CTA from that of a business. CTA ideas are:

• Request a quote from your business
• Schedule a tour of your school
• Visit another blog on your site
• Follow your account on social media
• Leave a comment on the post

3. Revise and Edit

Once you have a draft done, it’s time to edit, revise, and polish. If you publish a piece full of typos or something that’s poorly written, people won’t trust what you’ve written. That’s why it’s so important to edit before putting it up.

I’ve covered in the past more thoroughly on how to tighten up your writing, and those steps can help you edit, too.

4. Optimize for SEO

Outside of the technical aspects of SEO, writing good content should be the majority of your SEO strategy. But, there are a few key pieces people who aren’t used to optimizing their content for SEO might miss when publishing their blog.

• Do you have appropriate headers with h2 or h3 html tags?
• Do you have a custom meta title and custom meta description?
• Do images have appropriate alt text?
• Do you properly cite your sources?
• Do you have links to other content you’ve created?

Read my content writer’s guide to SEO for more.

5. Hit Publish and Promote

Once you’ve finished your blog, it’s time to upload! If you’re writing for a business that already has a website, it may be as simple as finding the blog section of the site and uploading it there. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to make sure you have a platform to publish on, like WordPress.

And, arguably one of the most important parts, get your blog out in front of people! Write a social post on your favorite platform that you’ve written a new piece. Ask people to check it out and give feedback. By asking people to interact with your post, it can increase your reach and get it on more people’s feeds.

6. Be Consistent

Now that you’ve published your post, it’s important to be consistent. You won’t get results with just one piece. Keep creating and keep pushing your content, and always go back to see its results!

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get visitors to your blog right away. It takes time to build a regular following.

Want More Blog Tips?

Let me know if there’s something you want me to go more in-depth on in a later piece! There’s a lot to cover, and I’m sure I’ll be writing more in the future.