How To Write A Blog Post

Today I thought I would share my process for writing a blog post. It may sound like a tiny detail, but writing technically good posts really helps your blog to grow. I also have a few tips on how to make your blog posts better.

Photos:

The first thing I do when starting a new blog post is take the photographs. You don’t have to do it the same way but I find that being able to see the photos helps me write the blog post.

You don’t need a fancy camera for taking photos, my advice is to always use the best camera you have at hand. If I’m at home I will use my SLR camera but I also get some really good pictures just using the camera on my phone.

The way you edit your photos is the important bit. They should be sharp and bright. Making sure your photos are in focus when you take the picture always helps. Then using your preferred editing software bump up the brightness and contrast. Adjusting the white balance really helps as well, this makes sure the white parts of the image are a true white. If you don’t know how to do this I wrote a tutorial.

Idea:

I can’t really tell you to do this one specific thing and you’ll get an idea for a post. I find that talking to people usually sparks an idea, especially on Twitter. However just stealing someone else’s post isn’t cool.

Once you have an idea write it down, I do this in a notebook but you can do whatever works. I also usually try to write a few points down that I want to mention in my post. This helps when I actually get around to typing up my post.

Structure:

Just like an essay, a good blog post should have a beginning, middle and an end. Start out with a little introduction to your topic, give a little overview of what you’re writing about. Don’t waffle! I know its tempting to write three paragraphs on what you’ve been doing recently and why you haven’t posted in a week but don’t do it.

Then write about your chosen topic. If you’ve already wrote down some bullet points use that as a basis for this part and expand them into a paragraph. Then sign off with a little conclusion. It doesn’t have to be much, maybe just ask a question for people to answer in the comments.

The three parts of the post are really important. More often now I’m coming across posts which have a long introduction then just stop. By having a start, middle, then end it makes the post feel more cohesive and well put together.

Spell check/ edit:

Doing a spell check and editing your post is a really important step in writing. Use the spell check feature in the software you’re using to go through your post but also manually check your post to find any spelling errors. The spell check won’t catch everything, especially if you’ve written the wrong word but spelled it right.

Then go through your post and see how well it reads. It may be that you need to change words or sentences. It’s usually a good idea to wait a few days before going back to do an edit, this way you catch out parts you initially thought were good but could actually be better.

Feedback:

I find it’s really useful to get feedback on my posts if I think the topic I’m writing about could annoy or offend other people. The best way to do this is to get a friend to read through your post, someone whose opinion you trust, because they are possibly going to tell you to change parts of your post.

I get a close friend to do this for me, what they are looking at is the content of the post, not the spelling or grammar. They are looking at the actual points I make to see if anything could possible annoy others.

FINALLY

After that all you have to do is share the post and hope people read it. Do you have any other tips for writing a blog post? Let me know in the comments.