Practical Tips: How to Structure a Blog
Build a Target, Then Plan an Approach
I know how it feels to have several ideas swirling around many points and tips you hope to share. Maybe you’re inspired by something someone asked you, and you feel passionate about getting your thoughts out. But when you sit down to start writing, you don’t know where to start. Or worse yet, you spend hours banging out a stream of consciousness without focus. I highly recommend developing a practice of taking time to plan it out first. Start with the general topic, determine your goal or intent, decide what you hope readers will get from or do with the info, and then note the main points you wish to get across.
What Are You Trying to Achieve?
Blog post ideas can be inspired by many things: people unaware of important issues, a need to build credibility, seeing a gap in knowledge or misconceptions about your work, or learning something exciting and new. Think about what you hope to achieve by writing about it to help guide your outline. For example:
An important issue has come up; I hope to build awareness and position myself as an expert on it.
People think I only offer one service; I want to write about my other services (a post on creative ways to do this is coming soon) to build awareness and make myself more referrable.
The application of AI is really exciting, so I want to tell my clients how we might take advantage of it or what to watch out for.
Identify All Supporting Points, Then Cull
Once you know what you want to write about and what you hope comes of it, jot down all the main points you think will best get you there. You may find there are several and have to choose the top few. If you try to include them all, it’ll be too much to absorb. Also, generating a daunting wall of text can deter people from even trying to read it. Tips or Top 10 lists can each be short and sweet, allowing for more of them. However, if you need to make a case for something with detailed explanations or stories, keep the number of supporting points down. Remember, you can always use it to create a series.
The Beauty of an Outline
This may seem a tedious task when you are raring to go, but it can really help you stay on track and deliver what you promised. Have you ever stopped mid-conversation and wondered how you got there? You think backward along a meandering path and realize this is not at all where you meant to take it. This may be fine in casual chitchat, but if you are asking people to invest in reading your blog post, you better deliver what they expect from the title or intro. Writing down your intent, proposition, and supporting points will give you the buckets to fill and something to review your draft against. The work of it may even generate a second outline for a future post. My outline for this article revealed that I had a lot of tips for structuring a blog, both practical and creative, so I decided to make it two separate posts. Watch for a future blog on structure styles.
And in Conclusion….
In conclusion, I have suggested developing a practical method for structuring a blog to help you avoid rattling on aimlessly or freezing with hands poised over the keyboard at the plethora of points or approaches you could take. Pick a topic, figure out what you want to come of writing about it, then note and select the top points for this post. Review drafts against the outline to see if you hit your target. In your conclusion, you should be able to recap the main points with confidence and pride that you did.
BONUS TIP
Your conclusion should include a call-to-action – subtle or more obvious self-promo. Though blogs are low or zero commitment, it’s understood you are writing them to build business, so provide a next step. If you aren’t sure how to do this, I can help. See what I did there?