HOW TO WRITE A BLOG EASILY 4 STEP TRAINING BY RAZA 786

Much of the content on this blog would serve as a guide, but it got me to thinking about someone who might want help writing a blog post when they’d never done it before. What could we tell them that would be helpful when they faced the blank screen?

A year ago, I had done a brief talk about blogging at our Web Builders Meetup, and part of it covered “How To Write A Blog Post When You Don’t Want To.” I based it on my own experiences and on content I’d written for this blog. The session went over well, though I did hear a few “but I still don’t want to write a post.” While I can’t help you all the way with your motivation, I can share a few of the things we’ve learned when it comes to how to write blog posts.

How To Write A Great Blog Post: Two Scenarios

There seems to be two scenarios when it comes to writing blog posts.

1. I have all the ideas in the world!!! General ideas and concepts are coming in a rush and I’m frantic to do something with them before I forget.
2. I have absolutely no idea what to write. I have an assigned post and no real inspiration or ideas coming at all.

Each scenario requires a different approach when sitting down to do the actual writing. The first, when ideas come easily, is about getting everything down on paper and then corralling it into order. The second, when you don’t know what to write, is about creating a logical structure that lets you bit-by-bit fill in the pieces. One feels inspired, the other feels like work.

Both are valid.

Writing When Ideas Come Easily

When you get an idea for a blog post and you are excited to write it, it’s almost as if your mind is gushing thoughts and words so fast that you can’t keep up. This often happens when:

• It’s a topic you are extremely passionate about.
• It’s a topic you came up with on your own.
• It’s a topic you talk about a lot when around people.
• It’s a topic you are truly an expert at from years of expertise.
• It’s a topic that is personal, or that you have learned from experience.

If you find yourself with a blog post idea that’s overwhelming you (in a positive way), this is the approach you should take to the post.

1. Write Quickly

Write quickly. It needs to be fast enough to keep up with the ideas in your head. Write it before you forget it, and don’t self edit quite yet. It may be a disorganized mess, with some ideas that aren’t fit for publishing, but that doesn’t matter. Write it all out.

Write a headline(s). You can change your headlines later. You will change it later. Sometimes off-the-cuff headlines are good as a guide. They are easy to change to a better headline after you’re all done.

Write everything. Start writing all the ideas that come to you, in no particular order with complete disregard for grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Use a word bank if you need to. Write questions and notes in with the rest so you remember what you need to research.

Write as it comes to you. If the post is due in the distant future, that free-form draft can be where you dump all thoughts and links that simmer and bubble during the week pertaining to it.

2. Write Slowly

Now that you’ve had your fun and written everything that came to mind, it’s time to bring order to the inspired chaos.

Pull it together. Find those thoughts that are similar. Put them into cohesive sentences and paragraphs. Pull those paragraphs into large sections. Do extra outside research if you need to fill in any gaps and to answer questions that came to mind as you were writing quickly.

Decide a basic outline. You have your content there. You’ve pulled it together and have a better idea of what you’re working with. Now organize it. You don’t have to do a formal outline, but you want to have you main idea, supporting ideas, and a conclusion, all in a logical order.

Write subheads. You have your basic outline. Create some powerful subheadings that fit what you’ve laid out. They should be compelling enough that you catch the reader who is intent on only skimming your content.

3. Burn

Now comes the time to clean up all of that random writing. You may have arranged it in a more logical order in the previous step, but you need to clean up the words and sentences, too.

Word removal. Remove most uses of the word “really” and other superfluous adverbs. Remove most uses of “I think” and “I believe”; your reader knows this is what you think because you were the one who wrote it. Words you’ve used repeatedly too close together sound poor to the reader’s ear. Replace any word you’ve used within the previous two sentences. Find a different word.

Paragraph removal. The paragraph you want to keep that seems to be so hard to get right? Cut it. Rethink your favorite phrases that are precious, that you are struggling to make everything else fit around. Be sure they are necessary, and that simpler words won’t do the job. Watch for things you’ve already said before. Cut anything you think is clever. There’s nothing wrong with clever, but it often becomes something we protect when it needs to be cut to make the rest work.

Idea removal. You may realize you have two ideas at work in your post, and that’s where the struggle is. Cut out the extra idea and save for another post. Clarity will appear when that happens.

4. Return

This is the Big Self Edit. You’ve dumped the raw words onto the page, rearranged them, cut the fat, and now you’re going to clean it all up for the final package. What are you looking for as you go through it one more time?

Is anyone going to want to read it? Do you use “Read More” in your WordPress post? You have to make your reader actually want to read more, just like a story. Write the intro short and sweet, with a cliffhanger. Or maybe you used the inverted triangle format for your post, just like a newspaper reporter.

Is it something readers can skim? It’s a shame to say, but even after all of your hard work and well-crafted words, many readers will be here to skim your post. Make sure you have headings and subheadings that clearly tell what your post is about. Have quotes, white space, bullet points, and anything that makes “quick reading” possible.

Is the tone and sound of it pleasing? Think of the reading tone as the equivalent to leaving white space so that a blog post is visually appealing. You want the sound of the post to be pleasant to the reader as they read it. Mix short declarative sentences with complex compound sentences. Avoid using the same noticeable words close to each other in a paragraph. This is noticeable. (See what I did there?)

What should your post look like, at the end of all of this editing?