5 Things To Think About Before You Write Your Blog Post

Posted by Madhavi on Oct 5, 2011 in Web Writing | 0 comments

Writing a blog post can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. However, with a little bit of planning before you write your blog post, you can make the process very straightforward and efficient.

Normally, I have a fair idea of what an article or blog post is going to be all about before I sit down to write it. This is because I use a 5-Step process that helps me identify the blog post’s content and approach before I write the blog post.

Today, I am going to show you the process that I use to plan my blog post content.

Normally, I have a running list of article titles that I maintain as and when they occur to me. Then, when I have to sit and write an article, I look back at that list and choose a topic that I like, and go with it.

So, while I am thinking about the content of the blog post that I am going to write, I make sure I think about the following 5 things beforehand.

Let’s go through these 5 steps, one-by-one.

Purpose: Why are you creating this content?

purpose The first thing to consider is the purpose of the article. Before you write that article, you must understand why you are actually creating this content. You must know why you are writing this article. The purpose of the article will outline the entire approach of the article, and will help you identify the content that you might want to include in the article.

For example, if the purpose of your article is to inform and educate your blog’s readers, then you will write the article a certain way. But if your purpose is to show your blog’s readers how to do something in particular, then your article will be written in a totally different manner.

Audience: Who is the content for?

This is the next thing to consider before writing your blog post. Your content, your approach – all of it will vary depending on the audience that you are writing the blog post for.

Ideally, you can then use a language style that your audience will understand. If it is an industry-specific article, then you can even use the jargon that will be understood by that audience.

Knowing the level of understanding of your audience also helps you to determine the kind of article that you want to write.

For example, if you are writing for someone who is a beginner, you will word your article in a certain way. But if you are writing for someone who is an intermediate level or advanced user, then your article will be written differently.

Media: Where will this content be published?

Once the blog post is written, it will be published somewhere, right? Where will it be published? It is very important to know that, because that will help you define the other parameters of the article like its length and its content.

For example, if you are going to publish the blog post on your website, then you can probably have a longer article (say 500+ words). You might even be able to include a You Tube video. If you want, you can add a downloadable PDF.

But, if you are planning to publish the blog post’s link on Twitter, then you are pretty much restricted to using 140 characters. In that case, you need to make sure you have that content ready with you when you publish the article.

Or if your blog’s content is mainly a video, then you might want to publish the video on your You Tube page as well, and include a transcript / PDF download link for the transcript.

Content: What are you going to say?

content This is the actual meat of the blog post – the content. You need to know what it is that you are going to say in the blog post. If you’ve done the previous steps correctly, then by now you should have a fair idea of the content of your blog post.

The important thing here is to be able to organize this into byte-sized chunks that are easy to grasp for your audience, and effectively use bullet points and headings to convey this content.

If you have a good idea of what you want to write in your blog post, then the process of organizing the content comes with practice. When I started out, I used to write and re-write my articles many times. Now, I don’t need to do that much of work – the organizing comes more easily.

Analytics: How do you measure the success of the content?

This is the step that comes after the blog post gets published. But it makes sense to think about this before you write your blog post. Because this too helps you identify and add to the value of the previous steps, and thus will help you tone and word the article accordingly.

Measuring the success of an article is often a very intricate process. You can use tools like Google Analytics to see how many visitors read that article, and then out of those visitors, how many were new visitors and how many were returning visitors. If you use FeedBurner, then you can also see the reach of your article’s RSS feed and learn how many people read the article. If you use an e-mail Newsletter service like MailChimp, then you can see even more data like how many people opened their e-mails to read your article, how many clicked through and visited your site to read the rest of your article, how many people shared your article on other social networking sites etc. If you use this brilliant social sharing plugin on your WordPress website, then you can see right away on your blog how many people shared the article’s link on different social media websites.

Again, it is up to you to decide which metric has more value. Does it mean more for you if your article generates a certain amount of hits, or tweets? Do you want people to ‘like’ your article on FaceBook or does it mean more to you if people forwarded your newsletter e-mails to their friends?

Which statistic matters the most?

Knowing this will help you write the right kind of ‘call to action statements’ in your blog post so that it is geared towards the kind of audience and generates the kind of a response that you want.

In Conclusion…

Understanding these basic 5 steps will help you write a better blog post for your website. If you think about these few things before writing your blog post, then you can be assured that you will write a better, more effective blog post that will appeal to your chosen audience and will give you the results that you desire.

What do you think? Are there any other steps that you think I should include? Do let me know in the comments section below.