Interested in blogging but don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, it happens to all of us. Writer’s block is a common obstacle that many blogging newcomers face when first starting out. In this post i’ll show you THE best way of how to structure a blog post. Not only will you learn about how to structure your posts, you’ll also learn great techniques to speed up your writing and optimise your posts for search engines (SEO) too.
First things first, you’ll want to input the spine of your post. What do I mean by that? Well, i’m referring to the various sections, chapters or paragraphs of the post that you will be filling out along the way. The spine of your post will include vital sections such as an Introduction, Answer & Conclusion. From there you can fill out each section before removing these spine headings prior to publishing the post.
You can find a more complete list of your blog post ‘spine’ here…
- Introduction
- Answer
- Developed answer
- Related questions or List items
- Conclusion
I have listed the various sections in order of appearance in your posts, obviously starting with the introduction and ending with a conclusion. I will start off my post by inputting each of these in as headings or titles, so that it gives me a clearer idea of how I will structure the blog post.
The meaty part of your posts (a.k.a. everything in between) will depend on what your blog post is about, for instance if you’re writing a list post, such as “10 reasons why blogging is awesome” then you might not need to include any related questions – but i’ll explain that later on!
Structuring your blog posts
To clarify, you’ll want to input each of these numbered posts in before you start writing any of your content. It will give you a clear idea of what to write & where, especially when you write in your related questions or list items. Without further ado, let’s go through them…
#1 – The Introduction
The first, and potentially most important, part of your blog post will be the introduction. Why is it so important? Well, without a good introduction your reader might become easily bored or confused and as a result – click the back button.
Your introduction should be relevant to the blog post title, as that’s what the reader will have searched for and clicked on. If it seems irrelevant or doesn’t make sense to them then they’ll leave the site before they even consider looking at the rest of the post.
Your introduction should be a single paragraph that relates to the reader’s problem or current thoughts, you can consider this by looking at reader intent. I know that if a reader has clicked on a post that’s called ‘How to structure a blog post’ then they’re probably struggling to write a blog post on their own, hence why I started this post off with “Interested in blogging but don’t know where to start?”. Instantly they know they’re in the right place, I’ve caught their attention.
NOTE: Do not use a heading for your introduction.
#2 – The Answer
Quite often you’ll be writing a post that answers a specific problem that your target audience will be facing, at least that’s what I would advise that you do! In this instance you’ll want to follow up your introduction with a paragraph that answers their question within 5-6 lines.
The idea behind this is that your reader is looking for a specific answer, they don’t want to have to go in and dig for it, by providing it up front they’ll respect that you’ve saved their time and will actually be more intrigued to read on. If you want you can even make this paragraph bold to highlight that the answer ‘is here’, like I have above.
NOTE: Do not use a heading for your answer.
#3 – Developed Answer
Now, it can sometimes be difficult to answer the whole question within 5 lines. That’s why you should use your third paragraph to develop on the answer you’ve given by explaining it further or providing examples to clarify your point.
For instance I gave you a list of headings that you’ll want to start off with when structuring your blog posts, but then I went on to develop that [answer] by explaining that the related questions and list items would be dependent on the type of blog post that you were writing. If I hadn’t of written that, you might have presumed that you would write both.
NOTE: Do not use a heading for your developed answer.
#4a – Related Questions
This is the part where you’ll want to dig even deeper into reader’s intent, for instance if I was searching for a post on “How To Structure A Blog Post?” i’m obviously looking to find out how to write my posts in a way that’s not going to give me a headache right? Right.
But I might also be interested in knowing how many words i’ll have to write too! Hence why later on in this post I’ll include a section on “How long should a blog post be?”. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered 😉
You can include as many related questions as you’d like to answer, as long as it’s relevant to the initial topic and is likely to be interesting to your reader. At the end of the day, you can’t give enough free (and helpful) advice!
NOTE: Use headings for your related questions!
#4b – List Items
The alternative to including related questions, would be to include list items instead. The reason why we might do this is because we’re stating that we’ve got “100 ways” or “5 best tips” or a “10 step guide” on a particular subject of interest.
By writing a blog post like this, it wouldn’t make much sense to break up the post into answers and related questions, instead people pretty much want to dive straight into the list, therefore you’ll structure your blog post by including your Introduction, then your List Items (i.e. 1, 2, 3 etc) and then your Conclusion.
A great example of a List post is my blog post on the 50 Best Entrepreneurs To Follow On Social Media, check it out!
NOTE: Use headings for your list items!
#5 – Conclusion
You’ll often find that your reader will skim through the blog post and even just jump straight ahead to the conclusion, that’s why its essential that you provide a decent summary of what you’ve written above. Obviously you don’t have to replicate the entire post but a single paragraph or two should suffice.
It’s also really helpful to add a question at the end of your conclusion, to entice readers to engage with your content. Receiving comments and replying to followers is a great way to grow your brand & acquire new clients.
NOTE: Use headings for your conclusions!
Helpful advice
As I mentioned earlier on this post, it’s helpful to add some related questions that the reader would be interested in, based on the intent of clicking on this post in the first place. That being said, I’ve answered some related questions for you below…
How to name a blog post
You want to name your post in a way that makes sense to the average reader, it should be relevant to the content of the post and enticing enough to make the reader click on it in the first place. Remember your blog post title alone (with the meta description) will be battling it out with the titles of similar posts, make sure that yours stands out!
How long should a blog post be?
If you ask most people how long a blog post should be, more than likely they’ll suggest to you that 500 words is the amount to aim for, however they’ll be wrong. Research shows that long-form content is king when it comes to Google search rankings, and posts with 2,500+ words tend to perform best.
Obviously though I wouldn’t expect you to write that many words on every single post as you’ll end up burning yourself out! Instead you should aim to answer very specific questions with posts sized over 1,000 words or more.
When starting out there isn’t much point trying to smash out 3,000 word posts as you’re still trying to gain Google’s respect, and the post will just fall by the wayside. Instead by answering specific questions, such as “How to structure blog posts on WordPress”, you’ll have a much higher chance of ranking when compared to writing a post titled “How to start a blog”.
Which images should I use?
You want to be careful using images that you find on the internet, as you may require authorisation from the original photographer, graphic designer or illustrator before using them, without authorisation you may be liable to legal action.
Of course you can always create your own images, especially if you’ve got a decent camera – phone cameras are decent enough these days.
If you check out my latest post on How To Stop Being A Perfectionist In Business, you’ll notice that I no longer include images in the main body of my blog post content anymore, mostly because it was taking up a lot of my time – and because i’m fugly.
Finally, you’ll want to include a pinnable image on your blog posts, this will be a portrait image that is optimised for the social media platform – Pinterest. You’ll notice that I’ve included one at the bottom of the post. Pinterest is one of the best platforms around for growing a blog, you can check out my Pinterest account here.
Canva, Pixabay and Shutterstock are great places to find & create new images.
What tools can I use?
I personally use the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, it’s a free tool that helps you to focus on including your ideal keywords in your content, and as a result helping you to rank higher in search results.
Not only will it give you live suggestions on how to optimise your blog post for keywords, it will also offer writing suggestions too to ensure that the user gets the best reading experience possible.
Conclusion
By learning how to structure your blog posts, you’ll save yourself many hours & many headaches along the way. The simplest strategy you can implement is to start off by including various headings for the sections that will make up your post, such as the introduction, answer, developed answer, related questions, list items and your conclusion.
What’s been your experience with blogging so far?
