How to Write a Blog Post for Beginners: From Start to End

today i thought i walk you through exactly how i write my blog post i get tons of questions about this and i want to give you all the juicy details so writing blog posts is really the core of what you do as a blogger and i've got over 130 blog posts on my blog and i've been blogging for almost 10 years so there are many things i wish i knew when i started so today i'm giving away all i know from beginning to end when i write a blog post inside your blog post you can teach people inspire them with your ideas or sell something a product or service and you can apply my process of writing blog posts to different types of content i'm doing the same thing when i'm planning a youtube video or maybe you want to create a podcast it works for both i have to make it easy for you and so that i don't lose my head in the details i structured this video into three parts what you should do before you start writing how to write a blog post and what you should do before and after you hit publish so let's do this so before you jump in and start writing your blog post there are a couple of things you can do to create the best content use your time efficiently and create content with a purpose so for step one before you start writing a post you need to decide what type of content you're going to create if you want to use your blog for business or to grow on social media then you're not writing for yourself you're writing for your audience and there are a couple of types of content that in my opinion work the best to do that so my favorite types of posts to connect with your audience are how to post list posts and reviews so first why how-to posts how-to posts are usually in-depth tutorials where you're being specific about a problem your audience has and you're trying to solve that problem for them it can be a walkthrough of a tool or a story of how you overcame a roadblock or something now the purpose of a how-to post is to educate your audience we always want a reason why we're writing a blog post otherwise you're just creating random things and believe me that's a waste of your time it's okay to spend a bit more time before you start writing if that means you're creating content with a purpose okay second we have list posts usually people love list posts because they are more actionable so for example the 10 things you need to do x y z or your seven favorite things for spring or the five must do step to whatever like lists help break down the complexity of a topic and it feels like the things has the thing has just become more doable you can do basically anything in like five steps right list posts also don't always have to be so in-depth as how to post so something like the 10 must-have spring outfits of 2022 can be put together much more quickly than a super long 4000 word blog tutorial right now the purpose of a list post is to inspire or educate your audience and third i love to write reviews reviews can be for example product reviews trend reviews or sharing a personal experience maybe you've done a challenge and you're taking your audience with you so for example the good and the bad what worked and what didn't work or the pros and the cons stuff like that reviews are also great for affiliate marketing so if you're using a specific tool in your business that has helped you make a transformation you can show your audience exactly how the product helped you go from point a to b and point b is that result they really want sharing affiliate products like this is so effective and in my opinion one of the best ways to start earning money from your blog so the purpose of your review post is to promote a product or service to your audience okay once i know what type of blog post i'm going to write the second thing i do before i start writing is creating an outline yes i do this every time i'm not usually a type a kind of person at all i'm more like the creative type and while i'm writing i get a million more ideas of what i could say i get lost so quickly so writing an outline is seriously a must and this doesn't have to be rocket science so here's what you can do to start write down everything that comes to your mind in a couple of bullets just free your mind and bring everything to paper then dive in deeper ask yourself did you cover everything do you need to do additional research into something or think about if you need to leave something out when you're an expert you can say so many things and go on forever but this could make it difficult for a beginner to understand so think about that too and then finally you want to reorganize and structure a great structure for how to post is for example first start with the what then continue with the why this is important and then you can do the actual how to do this thing in a full tutorial okay so we've made it through our preparation let's move on to step two how to actually write a blog post so when it comes to writing your content there are three things involved writing your blog post editing your post and adding add-ons so things that are supporting elements like images and videos and stuff like that are you ready to start writing now when you've done your outline and research this will be a piece of cake you just need to bring your thoughts to paper now i write all my blog posts in a google doc i'm not the biggest fan of the gutenberg wordpress editor so i write everything down in a google doc this way it's also saved if something ever goes wrong i got a folder for each blog post i have a doc for my outline and my content and if i'm also doing a video i can add that there too so everything is organized in one place now when i write i use a tool called grammarly to check my spelling i'm a native german speaker so english is my second language so naturally i'm going to make mistakes and i mean i make many many mistakes but you know what we're not aiming for perfection here grammarly will help you get rid of 95 of the mistakes there will always be the person pointing out that one typo but you know what it's okay i'm always assuming they mean well so the final thing here is that i read everything out loud maybe you've heard people talk about finding your voice and i always thought a bit that it sounds kind of woo-woo what does it even mean but the way i make sure the post sounds like me is to read it out loud i do this every single time and believe me this will make all the difference every blog post should sound like you're talking to your best friend reading your post out loud takes five minutes but you'll find those little spots where it doesn't sound natural okay when you're done with writing text editing is next here are a couple of tips i want to give you that i found to help people read through my posts more easily so they stay longer on my side so here we go always make sure to use subtitles in wordpress they're called headlines h1 is your headline one your main title you should only use h1 headlines one per blog post then use h2 to organize your posts and if you've created your outline this is already done then you can use h3 headlines if you want to structure it even further literally no one wants to read a 4 000 word blog post in one stream of text it's way too overwhelming okay now for paragraphs i tend to do short paragraphs usually one to two sentences you want to pull the reader through your content and i'm guilty of skimming um other people's stuff too but using strategic paragraphs helps people skim and actually read more of your content and third in editing i always use different font styles to highlight certain things or draw attention to something you can use bold text or highlight important points you don't want people to miss when they skim and then you can use the italic text function when you're commenting on something or giving a behind the scenes or you want to add a fun little text fragments all these editing techniques help people to get through to the end of your post and finally i do one more step before i move on to promotion and that is i include add-ons and any supporting elements so here i'm talking images videos and links so for blog post images there are three things your photos your graphics and your featured image aka your thumbnail okay so first i want you to add your photos so this is either photos you took and edited yourself so if you're a food or home decor style blogger or something this will be a big thing or you can also add stock images that help support your content stock images are taken by professional photographers but they've waived their rights to their copyright so you can use them on your blog then second add any additional graphics graphics can be for example infographics stats or your pinterest image or images for like a step to step guide so people know for example where to click and what to do now i use canva pro to create all my graphics there's also a free canva version you can test out yourself i use it every single day it's the best and finally you'll need to add your featured image aka your thumbnail so usually on your website you have your blog post page and there's the feed of all the blog posts you've written and then next to the blog post title you've got that featured image aka your thumbnail again i use camera pro to create my thumbnails and everything and that's it for blog post images so second as another add-on you can add a relevant video to your post if you have one this is only if you have a youtube channel or if you want to add someone else's video to your post videos can be great to break through your text and sometimes people prefer to watch videos you can upload your video to your media library and then add it to your content but i always recommend you start a youtube chat youtube channel and hear me out first you can add your video as a private video to your channel and then you only need to add the url you get from youtube to that post and it will show up as a video as well um it's the same thing but this way the video is hosted on youtube and not on your blog and this is important because videos are huge files that take up a long time to load so if you add a video straight to your blog post it will take time to load and people might not wait until it's fully loaded but jump right off and you don't want that um and you don't have that issue if you host a video on youtube so you're welcome for that tip okay and finally for our final add-on you'll need to add your links first add your other website links so maybe you've referenced something like a quote or a stat from another site so make sure you're also crediting those other creators with that link to that resource second add your related post links so maybe you've written a blog post that would help um to read after this post so you can deep dive into that topic some more so you can add your own related posts either at straight after when you mention that or you can also add it in a list as related posts at the end of your blog posts and finally add your affiliate links like i mentioned before affiliate links are great or a great way to earn your first income from your blog so when you mention products and services you want to make sure to add your affiliate links so that if a person ends up buying that product you get tracked and paid for that commission okay that was a lot already and you're doing amazing now this is where most people stop they press publish and they walk away but you and i are gonna go the extra mile today now this is where people go wrong big time we've got a couple more things to do before we publish our post and they're absolutely crucial for successful blogging so if you need to caffeinate before we move on grab that coffee or diet code coke or whatever is your gem and come back these are the things that are the difference between a hobby blogger and a six figure blogger so if you're ready let's talk about what you need to do right before and after you hit publish on your blog post now we've talked a lot about creating content with a purpose right so educating your audience or inspiring them but also promoting a product but another big purpose of your content is to attract people to your blog so they ultimately subscribe to your community and subscribing to your blog by that i mean joining your email list your email list contains all your blog subscribers including their email address in one tool they need to give you their name and email address so you can start sending them emails and your email list is the number one most important asset in your business no one can take away your email list your email list belongs to you it doesn't belong to instagram it doesn't belong to facebook it doesn't belong to pinterest and here's the most important thing about this your email list is how you will make most of your money as a blogger and i know this is a shocker to many beginners but it's a hundred percent true it's true for me and i know it's true for many of my blogger friends email is still the number one way of how to sell products and services to your followers so before you hit publish you want to add that opt-in form an opt-in form is something that looks like this and people can type in their name to subscribe they are then added to your list and you can start sending them emails and like i said this is a separate tool than wordpress and here i always recommend convertkit convertkit is my favorite email marketing service and you can start a free account with them for up to a thousand subscribers it has all the functions you need like automations to send out welcome emails and all that stuff so make sure you add your opt-in form to your new blog post before you publish now second and i'm probably going to bust another bubble here but just because you publish a new blog post doesn't mean people will show up and read it if you don't promote the heck out of your post no one will show up and i'm not saying this to be mean you could have the best post in the world if you're not going to promote it on social media and on google no one will even know it exists now if you've been following me for a while you know that pinterest is my favorite way of growing traffic so here's what i want you to do before you publish your post i'd love you to create a pin image you can share on pinterest you can embed that pin in the post like a regular image and when your post is live you can use the pinterest chrome extension or tailwind to post it to pinterest once that pin is live on pinterest people can search a topic and find your pin which leads them back to your blog and that's how they find you if you need help designing your pinterest pins check out my very own pinterest pin templates it's a pack that includes 57 different templates i've designed them myself so that you can get the most clicks over to your site so check them out by clicking here and then finally our very last step in creating our absolutely killer blog post is to do seo now please don't jump off there are just a couple of things you can do to start without going all out google craziness um so i'd love for you to install a free plugin on your blog called the yoast seo plugin it's free forever and will help your post show up on google when you've installed that plugin and you go to the back end of your blog post so um now you have this additional section at the end and here is where you can add a keyword and a snippet so first i want you to define a keyword each of your blog posts should have a keyword and the keyword can be any word but it can also be a short sentence a keyword is anything you type into a search engine like google to find something so when it comes to your blog post use a keyword you think people would type into google when they're looking for a post just like yours this is usually part of your blog post title so anything with a how to do xyz or ideas for yada yada something like that and then after you've defined your keyword i want you to also add your snippet now if you go onto google and look at the list of blog posts that show up you can see that below the title there's this little extract it's just one to two sentences what the post is about adding a snippet is so important for seo so make sure you'll fill out um and include your keyword keyword it will help you rank and get even more people to your blog from google and that's a wrap this is exactly how i write my super high quality blog posts people love but also help me convert people to subscribers and how they buy my products i know it was a lot but you can come back to this video and watch certain parts again and again and just as a disclaimer here it's normal that this process takes time doing all these steps takes me a long time too so don't listen to people telling you how they write their amazing blog posts in just one hour it's bs or they're just creating really poor quality i'm now giving you permission to create less if that means better quality so i really hope you've enjoyed this video let me know in the comments what you think and if there's something you'd like to know more about when it comes to blogging or pinterest now that's it from me for today don't forget to hit that subscribe button and notification bell below so you don't miss any of my videos i try to post a video about pinterest and blogging every tuesday and you subscribing really helps me keep my little one woman business going i love you so much and talk to you soon cheers

Channel: Katie Grazer

Views: 23,608

Keywords: how to write a blog post, how to write a blog post for beginners, how to write a blog post step by step, content writing, content marketing, content creation, blogging for beginners, how to write a blog, blog writing, blog post writing, how to blog, how to write a blog for beginners, blog writing for beginners, blog post writing tutorial, writing my blog posts, write a blog post for beginners, perfect blog post, write a blog post fast, perfect blog post format

Id: KkKp56E6UVo

Length: 17min 41sec (1061 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022