How To: Write a Blog
Blogs are just one aspect of a healthy content library and omnichannel marketing strategy. They’re important to your overall strategy in that they provide you with content to distribute on your social media channels, they help drive organic traffic to your website, and they help to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Above all else, the content you create should be of use to your audience. It could inspire, educate, or spark discussion - whatever goal aligns with your brand. Essentially, you want your blog content to do double and triple duty. When you know your purpose, you can begin to create content that drives you to that goal.
Start with Relevance
Pick a Topic
The first thing you should do when setting out to write a blog is to pick a topic to write about. Things that influence your topic choice might be the time of the year - if your business is seasonal, e-commerce, or influenced by holidays you might pick topics centered around Christmas shopping, Halloween, dressing for the weather, etc. You might also base your content calendar on hot topics in your industry. What are some topics trending in your industry? Do you have a unique perspective on those trends?
Research, Research, Research
The next step is to gather some research. Remember when you’re writing blogs that your goal isn’t just to get content out there for SEO or because it’s what everyone else is doing. It needs to be useful to the reader. That means it shouldn’t just be your opinion, it should also be based in fact, or at least corroborated with the opinions of others in your industry.
Take to Google and gather some quotes that you can use in your blog. Research is also great if you’re not completely familiar with the topic or are ghostwriting for someone else. If you’re writing about something that’s hot or new in your industry, check out the latest news articles and see what’s buzzing on LinkedIn for that topic.
Remember to always check the dates on your sources as well. In some industries, it may not matter how old the blog or news article is, but in others, it could be extremely important. You definitely don’t want to write an article about tips for social media and use source material from 2007 - the industry moves too fast to use something from that long ago. Covid is another consideration when doing research. How affected your industry was by the pandemic may influence whether or not articles written pre-Covid are even valid.
Write the Thing
Create an Outline
Take a moment and think back to high school English. Remember all of those outlines you had to write and turn in but never used? Well, the time has come. When constructing your blog and optimizing it for SEO, you’ll find that, for maybe the first time in your life, an outline is going to be super useful. I promise.
To create an outline, take all the research you did, gather your thoughts, and put them into bullet points. Use those bullet points to create sections and subsections in your outline.
Do The Actual Writing
Now that you have an outline with a hierarchy, start writing out your paragraphs for each of your bullet points. I always tell people to write the body of their piece first. Get the meat of your topic on the page then go back and flesh out an introduction to the topic and your closing.
As you’re writing, remember the purpose. Remember that you’re writing something that other people are looking for an answer to. Fill it with interesting tidbits of information and don’t be afraid to put your personality on the page. It doesn’t need to sound stuffy or formal language (unless the nature of your brand demands formality). Remember to have fun while writing - if you’re engaged with what you’re writing, your audience is more likely to resonate with your enthusiasm.
Edit, Edit, Edit
Once you have the blog written, it’s time to do some editing. Remember when I said your outline will be important? Here it is.
Your bullet points become your headers.
Reread through the paragraph for each bullet point and come up with a snappy title. Perhaps your blog is “steps for things”, or the “top five something.” That makes it a little easier. But even if it’s not, make your headers something witty, something that includes your target keywords, and descriptive & relevant to what the paragraph is about. Think of it like a little title for each little paragraph.
Check for Errors
Read through the whole article again and make sure it’s cohesive. Reading it out loud will help you identify any missing words or goofy grammar mistakes. Use your spellcheck and I also suggest using Grammarly to check for tone and clarity.
Get it Online
Once your content is in a good format, copy and paste it into your blog editor on your site.
Double-check your headers. Make sure your headers begin with H2 and your sub-headers should be H3 and so on. Your H1 header is your blog title. If the format looks wonky, check your settings and adjust your Heading text settings. You may need to adjust your font or font size so it looks appropriate and easy to scan with your eyes.
Make sure you select an image for your blog. Depending on your blog template, your image may be a large hero image at the top of the page and also the icon image on your main blog landing page. You’ll probably need to crop the image and resize it to fit the dimensions correctly. Also, consider how the image will look when you copy/paste the link into your social post.
Each website builder is a little different and each website theme has its own quirks on top of that. If you run into issues, schedule a session with our team or contact your website developer.
Add alt text to your image. This is for readers that make websites accessible. Make sure your alt text contains some text that describes the image & relates it to your content. Your SEO will get dinged from Google if you don’t have alt text so make sure you do this step!
Once your blog looks good, is formatted properly, and is checked for spelling & grammar errors, you can hit publish and push it out into the world. Promote your new blog with a social media post on each channel you use. Share your blog post in a newsletter email to your current customers or leads.
Helpful Tools
There are a ton of tools out there that can help you draft an awesome blog article. These aren’t paid mentions and are the tools that I currently use or have used in the past when I write blogs for clients.
There are a lot of SEO tools out there to help you pick keywords and research your competitors. Spyfu is a great, relatively inexpensive tool for basic SEO needs. It has keyword data, competitor data, ads, and rankings. It’s not as robust as SEMrush or others but the cost is minimal and if you’re just starting out, it has pretty much everything you need to get started.
I was an English major and I still find the free version extremely valuable. Grammarly is useful for identifying the tone of your writing, concise language, and other basic grammar issues. You don’t necessarily need to follow every single grammar adjustment it wants you to make - rules are made to be broken - however it does give you insights to which you can use your own discretion.
These sites are fantastic for finding great, free stock images for your blog hero image. To go a step further you could download your image and then toss it into Canva (which also has a free version) and add a little design to it so it’s more on-brand or unique to you. Pro tip: use short keywords when searching on these sites. Longtail keywords won’t get you more specific results.
If you’re planning on doing a lot of content creation or have very specific images you want to use, you may benefit from paying for Adobe Stock. Subscription levels vary and it can get pretty pricy so I only suggest this to clients that have a decent budget or are generating a huge amount of content.
Conversational AI tools like ChatGPT can help you outline your blog article and generate some of the content. I caution against using ChatGPT to write your entire blog article whole-cloth, though. It lacks the flavor and voice that your audience finds engaging. So if you do use it, be sure you do some heavy editing.
Need help with your marketing strategy or can’t find the time to produce awesome blogs? Schedule a consultation with Visceral Ore today.
