Ever wondered how to write blog posts? Well, creativity can be helped along no end with good processes. This is my personal process for creating great blogs, as a professional explainer. Follow it if you like, but I encourage you to work out what works best for you.
How I Write Blog Posts as a Professional Explainer™
Planning
When I’m tasked with writing a post, I first get my planning hat on. I kick off with a spot of keyword research around the topic at hand and see what kinds of search terms people are using to learn more about the topic, to gauge their search intent, and where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Then, I create a few notes – what headings I would like to include, their rough hierarchy as H1, H2, H3, H4 headers within the page, what keywords to include in each header and each section. This is to ensure both maximum SEO keyword effectiveness and maximum comprehension. I’ll also jot down what each section needs to include; the facts I want to draw on and the conclusions I (or the client) want to make.
Then I’ll flesh this out with a bit of extra research around some of the finer points to make sure I’m putting the right information forward and doing so accurately. It’s not necessarily in full sentences at this point, though I naturally end up writing that way!
After this planning stage, I let my notes rest. This provides the opportunity to run them past the client and/or to allow more creativity to build in the interim. I find that separating the planning and writing stages works best for me.
Writing
And now for the bit you’ve all been waiting for – the actual writing! Largely informed by my plans and any feedback I’ve received from the client, I will start pulling my notes and structure together from the planning stage and crafting a more meaningful narrative flow.
A few assorted pointers here. First up – you need to make your text look light and digestible. Things like line breaks and bullet points make your text easy for skim readers to understand without excluding more in-depth content scrutineers.
Choose a magnetic title and ask crucial follow-up questions in your H2 and H3 headers – like what is [the topic], how to [do the topic], and why is [the topic] and answer them in the body text directly below. Why? Well, featured snippets are the larger chunks of text that Google tends to return in response to questions. See what it says for the question you’re answering – can you give a better, clearer definition in your post in under 50 words? If you do so, you may be in with a chance of leapfrogging the answer Google’s currently choosing!
Wherever it makes sense to do so, consider putting your target keywords – or sentences containing them – in bold or italics; especially when you’re answering an important question like “what is [key term]?”. It helps to draw the eye to the answers people are most likely to be looking for and can help search algorithms understand your SEO intentions too.
Editing
With that out of the way, it’s now time to edit. I’m afraid that I am strictly an on-paper editor but I do what I can to make as little ecological impact as possible.
I tighten everything up and make sure that the article adds real value over at least two rounds of edits. Then one last final spell check, proofread, and keyword density check and it’s ready to go! Godspeed little (or perhaps not so little) blog post, we’re all rooting for you!
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