Creative Approaches: How to Structure a Blog
Five Different Styles for Blogs
Having a few different styles in your back pocket will help reduce the feeling of reinventing the wheel every time you sit down to write a blog post. You don’t have to pick a style to stick with for all your posts. You can have a few in your arsenal and choose what works best for the topic. If you start by creating an outline, it’ll help you determine your intention and pick a format. There are more than this out there, but here are a few to get you thinking.
1. Five Paragraph Essay
You may remember learning to write essays like this in high school. It’s pretty flexible as far as fitting topics but lends itself well to sharing an opinion that requires backup. It keeps me from overloading the reader, too. The idea is to make a statement or share an opinion and high-levelly list three arguments behind your thinking in the first paragraph. The next three paragraphs are used to make those separate arguments in support. The conclusion basically summarizes your points and how they prove or support the original proposition. And, because this is a marketing tool, add a call-to-action that provides a next step (i.e.: links to more free value or ‘call me for help’).
2. Who, What, Where, When, Why… and How?
This is basic journalism. If your post topic is more akin to reporting on what’s happening in your industry, a conference you went to, informing about important changes that are coming or doing a review, this might be the right approach. Start by answering basic questions. Who’s involved: the authority, the instigator, who it affects, who was present, etc. What was it for, what actually happened or is going to happen? Where and when did it or will it take place, or come into effect, is it online or offline, etc. Why did it happen or is happening, or why should we care? How did it come about, or how will it be rolled out? Answer these questions in bullet points, then massage that outline into a complete story.
3. Top Five Lists
List posts adapt well to providing tips and information; like this post! I am giving a few different options or ways of doing something. They don’t support an opinion or proposition made above, so they don’t have to dovetail together in the end. I’m providing separate pieces of information related to a common theme. These posts also indicate it’ll be something quickly scanned, with more detail available if interested. They are often a low commitment and lighter read. The lists could have any number of points, but I would limit it. Titles with numbers above 10, like “Top 50 Reasons to Zumba” sound like click-bait.
4. The Case Study
Case studies are really excellent ways to explain all your services and demonstrate experience. Case studies can be a category of your blog or appear separately, but you can manage them through your blog platform to make it easier to add them yourself. For example, I could duplicate the blog twice in my navigation but name one ‘Case Studies.’ A case study should be a bit more formal, and one way to do that is to create a predictable formula such as: project name, your role, the challenge, what was done, and the results. Long-time client Green Reason is a great example. The formula helped them fill buckets with info that I massaged into what you see here.
5. Tell a Story
This is great for relating an experience or observation, illustrating a service, or teaching something you wish people knew. It’s a looser format and can be more entertaining. Beware that it’s tricky without the feedback of live storytelling. It needs to be planned even more so than other styles: determine a purpose or point to make, note main highlights, and include a satisfying ending. I tell a story meant to illustrate the importance of thinking through and connecting points on the entire marketing path to demonstrate my knowledge. If not told carefully, it could come across as calling out the client. An outline will help ensure you make the point you want.
Style = Structure
If we wrote stories like we tell them in real life, they would be meandering diatribes that could easily miss their mark. Your blogs are a marketing tool. They need to sound professional, provide value, make a point, or share a moral. Having a few different styles to draw from will help you do that and make it easier to get those ideas out. You could even consider creating outline templates to go with each style to save some time on that step of structuring your post.