A step-by-step guide for writing your blog posts from beginning to finish

Ready to start writing a blog but you don't know where to start? There are four proven steps to producing successful blog posts from start to the end.

There are many forgettable blogs out there.

It doesn't mean you have to be one of them.

And I am saying this from a place of affection -- it most likely could be at the very least a portion times.

Don't worry, I'm certainly not taking it personally. We're not immune to being forgettable on this blog.

If you've got just an hour or so to make a post of a long form -- that's how long is required by the majority of professionals creators of content -- cutting corners isn't only natural but it's an essential part of survival.

But here's the truth, though.

Creating a successful blog doesn't mean spending six weeks on an article. It doesn't need fountains of money to pay an experienced writer either.

What it does take is careful planning, brutal editing, and patience. Get those three down, and you've got an 434% higher chance of performing well on the search engine results webpage (SERP).

Plus, the 3-4 pieces of material consumers go through prior to when they talk about sales, won't just start a conversation.

It will be closed.

Let's see how everything functions, the reason why it's important, and how to do it in just four easy steps.

How blogging has become more essential than ever in 2019

If you're already on board the blogging train , and don't need to be sweet-talked about the advantages of using blogging to promote your online business -- of which there are plenty and many to skip right to the steps in the following section.

The gist of it is that:

Blogging gets your pages indexed by Google. The more you blog and the more pages you get into. On average, websites with blogs have 55% more visitors than websites that don't.

Visitors mean more chances for turning leads into buyers.

Plus, Google accounts for 57.8% of referral traffic through the web, so anything you take to make your business a bigger player to Google's eye such as blogging regularlywill only help your business's bottom line.

That's not even the  most important metrics for how blogging can be an essential tool for online companies.

The softer, but no less crucial, aspect of the blogging puzzle is the way it affects trust.

Visitors have to trust you enough to share their personal information and become leads, and those leads need the same for them to be customers.

In the end, they're just giving you a name and an email that they are able to overlook when they make purchases. They're giving you bank account information as well as credit card numbers.

and they're doing this without a great deal of anxiety.

Only 48 percent of Americans reported trusting in organizations as businesses in 2018.

That was a ten-point drop over the prior year.

This trust gap is what blogging addresses. When consumers are exposed to a piece of educational content from a brand, there's a 9% hike in trust  as well as 31% more likely to decide to purchase.

That's the risk.

Gain trust from people, and get customers.

Don't earn it and you'll lose it.

Blogs are the most trustworthy and cost-free way to get on the good side of the trust of others and be in Google's good favor. And, until virtual or augmented realities become increasingly accessible, that isn't going to be the case this year, or next year, or even the next year.

Therefore, if you're trying to drive more traffic and build trust and expand your readership it is essential to start a blog.

And you want to start with an outline.

Step 1: Outline your blog post.

If not, let me tell you about an study.

For the sake of this article for this piece, I didn't follow this step and wrote the initial part -- what you read from this line or prior to it -- without an outline. It took me almost three hours.

Since this blog article will be about 2500-2000 words, that equates approximately 20% of the work that needs to be done in nearly half of the day I'll have to finish it. Keeping at that place the time would be 15 hours from beginning to end.

15 hours is fine for my needs. My job involves editing, writing, and creating content. But you? You probably don't have two days of work to dedicate to a single article.

You have other things to do, assuming you're like the 66 percent of small business owners with responsibility for at least three areas of their businesses (sales Customer service, sales, marketing, et cetera).

For those who are a side-hustler, you're probably currently in the middle of the 19 months that it takes, on average  for a side hustle to grow into a full-time job.

This is where outline templates can help. Outlines are where you search for the information you need, then create your graphics as well as think through the content. They frontload the work and help you save time.

And most importantly, outlines are where you outlaw writer's block.

It's the thought process, greater than drawing (to use a term borrowed taken from NYT best-seller Ann Handley ) and snaring that frightens people up during content production. If you're aware of the content you'll create from the beginning until the end, it's just the matter of putting together some words that are coherent.

If you don't, on the other hand you'll run through writer's block, ramblings and even a writer's block. It's not clear where you're trying to end in, and you won't be able to determine which direction you should go into.

The result is likely to be in a blog that isn't very engaging.

There's no set rule for how to make an outline. Every writer I've ever met uses their own method of outlining, and every business must meet different standards in their writing.

The format that I created (and later foisted upon the content team) is as follows:

      [Header title]      

Principal Point:

Stats:

Case Study:

Examples:

I complete it by following a sequential sequence, often I write in shorthand but sometimes using full, fluid sentences. I keep working on it until I've created an outline that will take me to the end without leaving the outline.

That's all there is to it. However long or short the outline you create is based on the style you prefer. If it's got the essential elements for an article, it's golden.

Now, after you've nailed the outline down You're now ready to move onto both the easier and the more difficult steps:

Beginning with your writing.

Step 2: Write your blog post. Seriously. You just need to start.

It is estimated that there are 33 million search results for the term "writer's block".

This isn't surprising.

If you are unsure when I tell you this like a lot of people do, then I'm sure you're not wrong:

There is no such thing as writer's block.

The same thing happened to me have been a victim to during my very first days of work.

However, as the figures show, it's not an obstacle that flourishes very far for professionals. After all, most professionals can write an article of 500 words within about two hours. .

Given that the median post length for top-performing blogs -- ones that get shared so much you'd think they were an Netflix account (which is 2,000 words or more , that means the average completion time for the blog article that really stands out is approximately eight hours.

If you've followed the initial procedure, you'll likely be able to hit those same numbers -- or better.

The key is just to begin. Seriously. It's not easy. Once you've written your first draft and you have an outline that you can follow The writing process is simple.

However, since I am aware that I'm coming from a place that is privileged (I have been doing this for a long time) I'll give you a list guidelines that work for our team:

Avoid make use of a powerful word processor, such as Microsoft Word. All of its bells and whistles can be great for students, however, they can be distracting at most effective, but obstructive when their worstwhen it comes to non-academic writing. Personally, I love Google Drive and Dropbox Paper as well as Google Drive .

Do power through mistakes in syntax, typos as well as every other apparent error. It's possible to rectify mistakes later, but the most important part of writing is working on it.

Don't modify while working. This can slow you down and, ultimately, causes an additional burden when you reach the editing phase.

Do break your work up into segments. When you're discussing the diverse varieties of tea Don't build a wall of words which is so inaccessible that it could be seen by satellites from space. Take a divide-and-conquer approach as you compose your essay.

Of course, even following these rules and guidelines, with an outline at hand You're likely to encounter a problem or two while writing. It's natural.

If you're getting distracted from your blog post, try to write for only fifteen minutes.

That's what Dr. Larry Rosen , a research psychologist who has spent his entire career investigating distractions, advises, adding that you should stop at 30 minutes. The research has proven that concentration starts to break down when you've had a half-hour lapse.

If you're finding it difficult to concentrate and are constantly distracted from your writing, try turning off your mobile by setting a timer to it. After that, flip upside down, so that you don't get distracted by notifications and write for 15-30 minutes without interruption.

In the following time, you can you can take a break and satisfy your technology itch (aka, check your inbox at 90 times this morning -- people check their phones at least each 12 min ) or simply walk around and then go back to work until you finish.

It really is that easy.

The next step, unfortunately, isn't quite as cut-and-dry.

Step 3: Edit, modify, and edit again.

There is no perfect initial draft. Nobody can spot every single mistake, extra space, or extraneous comma from a compound predicate. This is because it's a limit that's wired in our brains.

It's true that when we are reading, and especially those who have skilled readers, they tend to not look over each word attentively. They read a passage like sushi and fill in the gap. There is a technique called saccades  they are similar to little visual pole vaults between focal and focal point, as we are reading.

Here's an illustration (and an experimental) arrangement of how our eyes react when studying a phrase.

Do you realize that certain words aren't read at all? Short words and functional words , which are words which relate to to the structure of a sentence and are particularly susceptible to being overlooked.

As an example, in the above sentence, most readers don't see "the", "in" in, as well as "a".

This is a lengthy way of saying that there's a lot of room for errors within a blog post and a piece sans edits or proofreading could lead to problems.

This propensity for imperfection is likely why only 46% of bloggers are the editors themselves and the remainder turn over proofreading to an individual before the next stage of publishing.

This is a wonderful thing that they do. Although it may be a little nitpicky as it appear it is, there are numerous studies connecting typos to negative image of businesses.

It is interesting to note that "grammos" which are written errors which indicate a misunderstanding of grammar rules, impact perceptions in different ways as do typos. Both of them have a negative social impact especially among shy people, while the typos can be much more damaging, one study found .

In the study, participants were asked to rank the phrases "this person is like me" and "I'd like to have this person as a housemate" in a range between true and false, using emails with errors and grammos. The result? Everyone rated people lower than they should have because of mistakes.

OK. It's a good thing I've got the point about editing and why editing is so important. If you've got the money, Upwork isn't the best place to look for an official editor. And there are plenty of fantastic freelance editors in specialized fields.

If not, however you can, the best alternative after hiring a professional is hiring a trustworthy friend to check for typos and proofread and let a word processing software handle all the work. Grammarly is the tool for choice, but it's not ideal.

Alongside (mostly) catching grammatical errors as well as typos, it's helpful in identifying issues with clarity such as wordiness, engagement problems, and delivery snafus.

In the event that you're planning to edit your own work completely as I have certainly done in my professional life You should give yourself a break before you do the work.

There's no way around it.

You already know what you meant to write. You just added the final tops on it.

The attempt to modify it all in the same sitting is going create to compete between the version of the blog in your head and the version that exists in reality, according to Tom Stafford  who studies spelling errors at the University of Sheffield in the UK.

He summarizes it in a concise manner:

"We don't catch every aspect, but we're not computers or NSA databases . . . Instead, we absorb sensory information and combine the information with our expectations to find meaning."

Don't edit your work in the same amount of time that you're finishing the article. Give yourself at least half a day (I prefer an entire night's sleep -- and then go through it with care, run it through process software and review it again following the publication.

And then, only you can begin to share your blog's post.

Step 4: Distribute your blog content.

The final step is fairly simple and will vary a lot for different companies, which is why I'm going to make this brief and simple.

At a high-level distribution channels, they can be divided into:

Social media

Direct shares (such as the ones you email an email or direct message to someone through the DM, or an individual email)

Email lists (what you will send out to your subscribers)

Paid advertisement

The most well-known channels for distribution for professional marketers typically follow this model and vice versa. Check it out.

There's been a lot of discussion about several of these channels previously and if you're thinking about getting into the game, these sources might be useful:

For when to promote and publish your material, the morning seems like a good bet. 70 percent of readers have reported enjoying their blogs during the early dawn hours.

The secret to making promotion work is to do it more often than you ought to, particularly through your social media channels.

Social media is similar to the beaches of the Pacific and whether people see your content wash up on their feeds is a numbers game.

If you only have one piece of content many will miss the opportunity. The wave will be lost in the ever-growing swell of information that your colleagues and competitors put out.

So you have to publish and advertise as frequently as you can. Be careful not to promote the same items in succession -- this can come off as spammy -- but don't hesitate to set the same piece of content in the course of the week or month.

"You'd be amazed at how frequently you're able to publish," Laura Roeder of the social media management software Edgar explained to us during an intimate webinar .

Although you might see your twenty tweets and Instagram stories talking about identical content, the majority of your fans won't, so every opportunity you can find to get your content in front of your followers is an opportunity you should to take.

In the end, that the only regrettable opportunities are those you didn't make the most of, right?

Rinse and repeat the steps in order to create a successful blog post.

In other words, here's the deal with blog postings:

Blogs are the most effective option to gain trust from your readers and begin attracting natural traffic.

The blog helps to address the trust deficit consumers have with businesses -- put simply, it helps your company appear an individual rather than a faceless organization. It makes you seem helpful.

The first step to writing a blog is to sketch it out. Writing outline helps to overcome writer's block and will keep you focused throughout the process.

The next step is to begin writing it down and focus exclusively on writing it. Editing comes in the next phase.

If you decide to start editing, do not stack your odds against yourself, and try doing it alone. It's a tougher to spot your own mistakes than someone else will since it's a contest between what you believe you composed and the one you actually did.

Once you've proofread your post, polished and posted your blog post, distribute the post. Do not be afraid to share frequently, especially if you're using social media. You'll be amazed at the frequency you post.

Are all blog posts effortless to write in this software? No. It's not even feasible for me. But is it a lot easier with these four steps than it would be without? I've staked my career on this.