How to Write the Perfect Blog Posts: Body Text
Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash
Over the years, I’ve developed a process that I follow every time I’m writing. From coming up with the idea through to a finished post.
I must admit, it’s different from what most people do but it works.
I’ve tried the conventional way of coming up with the idea, writing the body and writing the headline. But to be completely honest, this way is horrible. It leaves gaps and requires you to keep coming back to add things you’ve forgotten.
So let’s walkthrough, step-by-step, the process for developing engaging blog posts.
Write a Placeholder Headline
The first thing to do when you start to write out your post is to write a placeholder headline.
You do this so that when you’re writing the body of your post, you stay on track. It’s to give you an idea of what the post is about and to keep you from doing any of that unwanted ranting I briefly mentioned.
Staying on one topic per blog post is essential, not only for your post to succeed, but to keep plenty of content in your reserve bank. If you start talking about multiple topics per post, you’ll quickly run out of ideas and as we already spoke about, idea’s can be fucking hard to come up with.
You only want to spend about 10 seconds here. It’s a placeholder, so it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Writing Placeholder Subheadings
Starting with the subheadings before you write the body text is extremely beneficial for keeping your post streamline. It also drastically reduces the time it takes to put the post together, as you’ve already created the structure.
You need the outline of your post before you begin.
Another reason is to keep your readers engaged when you hit publish.
Remember you’re not writing a novel. All too often I see posts that are just long bodies of text. Immediately turning me off reading it.
Since you’re writing a blog post a majority of people reading it will lose interest before they even scroll down, so you want to make sure there’s something grabbing their eye. You do this by breaking up the text with subheadings (among other things that I’ll cover later).
To do this, focus on these types of blog posts:
List posts — “Top 10 tools for blogging”How to’s — “How to start a WordPress blog”Step-by-Step Guides — “A step-by-step to starting a WordPress blog”Q&A’sCase Studies
You can see a pattern. It works best for blog posts where you can pre-empt the outline.
I’ll give you an example:
Placeholder Headline: How to start a WordPress blog site Subheadings:
Buy a domain name and hosting packageUse their 1 button WordPress setupSelect your themeCreate necessary pagesWrite your first blog post
As you can see, planning out the subheadings in this kind of example ensures you don’t miss anything and allows you to expand on the subheadings. It’s the same for the other examples but note, they’re placeholders. You don’t have to stick with them. Delete and add as much as you need. It’s just a way for you to make it easier to stay on topic (this entire ebook had its subheadings written first).
Remember this one thing, readers scan at first. They look over your blog post to determine if it’s worth reading and more often than not, leave after the scan.
So you want them to get as much out of it as possible before they move one.
DO THIS NOW — write out your subheadings and make sure the reader can get everything they need to just by reading them and nothing else.
Nailing your introduction
Have you ever watched a Youtube video and the first 10 seconds is some completely out of context piece of content that has been taken out of the video because it’s the most attention-grabbing?
That’s how you need to start your blog post.
There’s a huge issue with writing in that people follow the exact structure they were taught when they went to high school.
You know the one (the one I’m moving you away from).
Introduce the topic, explain the topic, who, what, when, where, why, etc.
This style is great for press releases but it’s not for blog posts.
Make a promise now — Ignore the urge to follow the structure you were taught when you went to school and agree to always start your blog posts with something grabbing.
How do you do that?
Generally speaking, starting off with a controversial sentence or 2 does the trick. Something that people don’t necessarily agree with but would have a strong opinion on.
Here’s one for example:
Header: Don’t set a New Year’s Resolution in 2019. Do this instead!Intro: As 2018 finishes, it’s almost time to start hearing about all the amazing New Year’s Resolutions people will create for the 5th year in a row.With new hopes and beliefs that they will actually see them through. It feels great to set New Year’s Resolutions. But I’m urging you not to.
By reading that, you’re going to have a pretty strong opinion but it makes you want to read more because it leaves you asking ‘why’?
Why shouldn’t I set resolutions?
Why don’t you set resolutions?
Do you not want me to succeed?
Then as the person starts to read on they begin to learn that instead of setting resolutions, they should set goals. Which are 2 very different things and I would explain how they’re different and how to set goals.
Another example might be:
Header: The top 10 blogging tools you need to use to scaleIntro: If you’re still only using Google Analytics as your data tracking tool then your blog will never reach its full potential.There are thousands of tools out there that can help you grow your blog and while you don’t need all of them, you do need to be using these 10.
This way of starting out a blog also gives you perfect content for you to share on social media platforms and can often serve as a good Meta Description for SEO purposes.
Get them reading down the page
I mentioned that you want to break up your text. This is especially important in the intro because you want them to scroll down to the body.
To do this you need to build suspense and tempo.
This is done by using separate lines for separate sentences.
I’ll show you what I mean with a previous example:
As 2018 finishes, it’s almost time to start hearing about all the amazing New Year’s Resolutions people will create for the 5th year in a row. With new hopes and beliefs that they will actually see them through. It feels great to set New Year’s Resolutions. But I’m urging you not to.
See how you want to read the next line. It pulls you in and builds the suspense but what if I wrote it like this:
As 2018 finishes, it’s almost time to start hearing about all the amazing New Year’s Resolutions people will create for the 5th year in a row. With new hopes and beliefs that they will actually see them through. It feels great to set New Year’s Resolutions. But I’m urging you not to.
Yeah, it’s interesting, but where’s the suspense? It just looks like a big body of text.
This is a skill that I’ve picked up over time and you’ll get better at as you go.
DO THIS NOW — write out your introduction. Firstly write 3–5 sentences in one paragraph, then put all the sentences on separate lines and read it over. Does it build suspense? Is it controversial? If not, try again. As I said, you’ll get better as you do it more.
The bulk of the body
Now that you have your placeholder heading and subheadings, and have nailed your introduction, it’s time to work through the body of the post.
While I can’t tell you what to write as I have no idea what you’re writing about, I can give you helpful tips to drastically improve your post.
These will work for any topic. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about travel, motivation, digital marketing, food, animals, or whatever else, these tips are essential for keeping the reader engaged right through to the end of your blog post.
Write exactly how you talk
I know I already spoke about this point but I just want to touch on it again before you start to write the body.
You need to develop your own voice. Don’t copy anyone and ask yourself this question:
How can I stand out if I’m just like everyone else?
Okay, let’s move on.
Write the whole thing once
When the writing starts to flow, the last thing you want to do is break that.
That’s why when you start writing the body of your post, it’s important to write it all out in one session.
In some cases, I know that’s not possible. Especially if you’re post is going to be 2,500+ words. Try to do as much of it as you can in as bigger chunks as possible.
This is because of a thing called FLOW.
Flow is that state you get in when you’re so submerged in what you’re doing that anything happening around you is completely blocked out.
I can recall so many times when I’ve been in a state of flow then when I get out of it I have this faint feeling that someone was talking to me. So I’d go into my sister’s room and ask her if she was talking to me. To which I normally get the response of “Yes, about half an hour ago and you just ignored me’.
When I talk about breaks I don’t just mean getting up and getting a drink, I mean any kind of distraction that takes your mind off writing.
When you stop writing to check facts, re-read something you wanted to quote, edit or look up particular names, you take your attention away from writing and put it somewhere else. Which, more often than not, turns into checking social media, watching a Youtube video or just completely stopping altogether.
You’ll also find that in some cases you lose what you were going to say next and the blog post won’t read as smoothly as it would have if you just wrote the whole thing once.
So, remember, when you sit down to write the body of your post. Do exactly that. Sit down, write the whole thing out, then edit. Don’t break it up.
Further on, I’ll give you the best editing strategy for your posts to ensure they’re the best they can be.
Introduce the next subheading where possible
A post sounds smooth when the subheading is introduced in the previous paragraph.
Again, this is to keep the reader wanting to read more.
But get creative with it. Don’t straight up say ‘and in my next paragraph I’ll speak about….’. You want to hint at what’s to come.
Always include personal stories
Back when I first started writing blog posts I would hammer people with a whole bunch of information and advice and that would be it.
While the information itself was good, it wasn’t interesting. It wasn’t enough for people to want to read the whole thing. According to Google Analytics, they were leaving the posts within 10 seconds and my bounce rate was over 90%.
I had no idea why this was until I very luckily received an email from one of the readers.
Who essentially completely changed the way I wrote my posts.
They told me one important thing which was that I needed to include personal stories within my posts.
Ever since I have experienced much higher engagement with the posts I write.
So how do you do it?
Well exactly like I just did.
Consider it more of an example rather than a story.
The stories you include should never go on for too long and they should always be relevant to the post topic. You only want to include the most important bits of the story, while keeping it helpful.
I’ll give you an example, consider the story I just told you:
Back when I first started writing blog posts I would hammer people with a whole bunch of information and advice. While the information itself was good, it wasn’t interesting. The readers couldn’t develop a relationship with the posts and my audience didn’t grow for months. Luckily, I received an email from one of the readers which essentially changed the way I went about writing. It told me one important thing and that was that I needed to include personal stories within my posts. Ever since I have experienced much higher engagement with the blog posts I write.
Now read this version:
Back at the beginning of 2017, I started writing blog posts as a way of me releasing the emotions I was feeling with my Chronic Illness. I would watch a whole bunch of motivational videos and regurgitate the information I had learnt in a way that made sense to me with the hopes that it would make sense to others. I would write blog posts every day full of facts and information on how people could better their goals by changing the way they approached their life and their goals. I had written at least 60 articles… blah blah blah
I haven’t even gotten to the point of the story and I can bet most people would have stopped reading.
The problem with that version is that it includes way too much irrelevant information.
You need to keep your stories short, sharp and straight to the point. They should be used as validation to a point, not as the body.
That being said, if the purpose of the post is to tell a story then the body will be your story.
Which brings me to my final point.
Get rid of unnecessary words!
Most people have a habit of adding in words that don’t need to be there.
I think this stems from the need to hit certain word counts when you’re at school/university.
You know by now that in order to keep readers to stay engaged your posts need to be perfect and at any second the reader could be turned off your post.
A huge contributor to this is the constant use of unnecessary words. These words are added through unintentional habit but they need to be taken out.
Let me give you an example:
It was actually the best thing that ever happened to me.
In this example, I’ve added words to make it seem more interesting. When in actual fact, I’ve just made it longer.
It should read like this: It’s the best thing that’s happened to me.
Short, sweet, to the point.
To get you in the right frame of mind, here are some words to avoid:
JustReally/veryActuallyAlwaysOnlySimply (My least favorite. It makes the reader feel stupid)Basically (Same as above)
Start with these and re-read your sentences. Asking yourself if all the words in it need to be there.
Important points that you should remember:Your blog posts should be more than 300 words. Otherwise, they’ll be too short to attract organic traffic from Google. Ideally, they should be at least 1,000 words.List posts (Top 10…, etc) perform the best. So use them to build engagement.Remember KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Tone down the jargon and huge, pointless words.Use as many big sub-headers as possible. They help to break up the text.Do the same with images and other visuals.The use of CAPS, bold, and italics can help grab the reader’s attention. But don’t overuse it or it gets annoying and loses the effect.Always include a personal story.Remember to use short paragraphs.Join the Digital Marketing is for nerds 🚀 Facebook group! Where we’re building a community of digital marketers to share, learn and grow.
Helping each other write better. Join Us.
How to write the perfect blog posts: body text was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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