How to Write a Blog Post

Introduction

Your entire academic career taught you to loathe writing. Count the hours you’ve spent at your laptop struggling to wrangle your thoughts and turn them into prose. I can feel your pain and frustration. There’s good news though. Writing doesn’t have to suck.

In the business realm, the content we write should never feel frustrating. Our content is friendly, helpful, clear, and authoritative. We don’t obfuscate the truth. We make it easy for our readers to grasp complex ideas and find real-world solutions to their problems.

Story Brand Narrative Arc:¹

Our customers are the heroes in their stories. They have needs and they’re most likely unsure of themselves when it comes to fulfilling those needs.

Customers also have problems. This means that there’s a villain. This villain may take the form of an internal problem, an external problem, or a philosophical problem.

Customers meet us while researching ways to solve their problems. We are the customers’ guide on this journey. We use copy and content to empathize with their problems and position ourselves as an authority they can trust to help solve those problems.

It’s our job to give customers a plan and call them to action either directly, or transitionally. Their taking action results in comedy or tragedy (success or failure). By the end of this narrative, we’ve helped guide our customers through a problem and we help them transform.

You Are a Storyteller

As a content marketer and salesperson, you are a storyteller. You tell stories that position our customers as the hero and you always lay out a path that guides them to the successful resolution of their problem.

You can apply the above structure to any piece of customer-facing content. Your job is to order information and make things clear.

Why We Write Blogs

Blogs began in the 1990s as a loose forum or journal for individual expression. The word “blog” is literally short for “web log.” In regards to business, blogs are now highly dynamic and one of the most crucial means of guiding leads, prospects, and customers through a sales journey.

Blogs, articles, and literally every piece of content relating to your business should start by considering your audience and having some sort of strategic reader outcome in mind.

A blog post may be a how-to article that explains a process or means of accomplishing a goal. It could also take the form of an information piece meant to educate readers. A blog can be anything that you write to inform, engage or entertain your readers.

The ultimate reason we write blogs is to nurture our readers and prospective buyers and solve their problems. Blogs are a crucial component of the inbound marketing and sales methodology because they give value, before asking for it. They allow leads, prospects, and customers to take action in their own time.

Finally, when it comes to internet marketing and your website’s rankings in Google, blogs are essential. If your web property has no content associated with it, then no one will ever find you.

The strategic goal is to write content that’s useful and provides value. Providing value to strangers is what builds your brand, establishes you as an authority and gets people closer to becoming your customer.

Elements of a Blog Post

Business blogs always order important information. Because blogs live on the web, they are also ordered and systemized into a hierarchy of importance according to HTML (hypertext markup language) standards. The structure of a blog post (and any other web page always follows this pattern).

Headings

H1 - The Main Heading or Title of Your Blog Post, Article, or Web Page (there’s only ever 1 H1 on a web page.)

H2 - The Sub Heading of the Page and Start of a New Section

H3 - The Heading of a Given Section Inside of an H2

H4 - The Subheading of a Smaller Section Contained in an H3

Textual Hierarchy

Notice the styling of the above headings. You can see how each heading becomes smaller and visually less important as you move from H1 to H4. This is how we order the importance of information for our readers.

The inverted pyramid is another way to think about ordering information. With this structure, the large, news-worthy headlines appear with the largest headings first, while smaller less information gets pushed to the bottom. See the figure below:

You have to assume that your reader is frantic. They’re impatient and just need the one answer to that one question they have. They won’t ever take the time to read your entire article.

As the copywriter, it’s your job to order information and make everything easy to understand and digest. You are writing and ordering information so that your user doesn’t have to work hard and expend calories to find the solution to their problem.

Paragraph Structure

Think back to your academic days and ask yourself, “How long should a paragraph be?” Your answer will probably be around five sentences or so. For business contexts, this is wrong. The paragraphs you write should be no longer than 2-3 sentences. 2-3 sentences is the space you have to write a single idea and then signal to your reader that you’re moving on to the next one. Why do we use this paragraph structure? The answer is simple. Just look at this paragraph right here. It’s a full block of text - nearly indecipherable if you were to look at it while scrolling through a web page. In fact, this paragraph is intimidating. It’s a paragraph that will leave your reader asking, “Wait, I have to read this whole thing before I can get the answer and find the value I was promised?” This is bad. You’re making your reader work to understand your meaning. Use smaller 2-3 sentence paragraphs.

Sentence Structure

Using short paragraphs orders information in an easy-to-understand way for our readers. This same rule applies to our sentence structure.

Short sentences convey meaning faster. You don’t have room to accommodate superfluous adjectives, adverbs, and “fluff” in your copy. Your reader’s attention span is short.

Speaking of short sentences, let’s talk about the semicolon. Grammatically speaking, you use a semicolon when you want to yoke two ideas together. Semicolons are handy when connecting two complex thoughts, but for the average reader, they make your prose harder to read and more intimidating.

Instead, focus on containing a single idea in the space of a single simple sentence and avoid semicolons.

Active vs. Passive Voice

If we’re talking simple sentences, then you also need to understand the difference between active and passive voice. You probably remember your English instructor harping on you over this, but did they ever really teach you the difference?

Remember: a sentence is always composed of a subject and a verb. It answers the question: “Who did what to whom?”

What is Active Voice?

Active sentence constructions (active voice) put subjects and verbs as close as possible to one another. These sentences typically combine a subject with active, present-tense verbs in close

proximity e.g. compose, create, formulate, edit, convert, close.

Example sentence written using an active voice:

Customers read our copy to find solutions to their problems.

The above example takes a very firm and active stance. You know immediately who is doing what to whom and why or how they did it.

What is Passive Voice?

In the space of a sentence, passive sentence constructions tend to widen the gap between a subject and the verb action. These structures have a subject and a verb that is typically written in the past tense, that’s accompanied by a “to-be” verb e.g. is, as, was, were, be, been, am, being.

Note that the above paragraph contains predominantly passive subject/verb/to-be constructions. Also note: I wrote this sentence in the past tense, but the structure is still active.

Example sentence written using a passive voice past tense verb and “to-be”:

Our copy is read by customers to find solutions to their problems.

‍The above copy takes a passive and less clear stance. As a reader, the main subject of the sentence and what’s happening isn’t perfectly clear.

Why You Want to Write in Active Voice

Passive voice isn’t horrible - sometimes it’s unavoidable. What you need to understand is that if you’re trying to be authoritative and engage your reader, passive voice is not the way to do it.

These structures are what everyone thinks of as “academic.” They sound ornate, but they don’t convey meaning in an efficient or engaging way.

As guides to our customers, it’s our job to write with clarity and conviction. We need to convey complex ideas simply and efficiently and do so with authority. Writing in a predominantly active voice gets this done.

Ordered and Unordered Lists

You could never get away with ordered and unordered lists in a piece of academic work, but they’re great for blog posts and articles on websites.

Ordered and unordered lists sequentially structure information. Instead of full sentences, you list the most important aspects of an idea.

Ordered and unordered lists also benefit SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Web crawlers like Google Bot take preference to this content because it’s neatly structured and easy to digest.

Ordered lists look like this:

<ol>

Thing 1 <li>Thing 1</li>
Thing 2 <li>Thing 2</li>
Thing 3 <li>Thing 3 </li>
Thing 4 <li>Thing 4</li>
Thing 5 <li>Thing 5</li>

</ol>

Unordered lists look like this:

<ul>

Thing 1 <li>Thing 1</li>
Thing 2 <li>Thing 2</li>
Thing 3 <li>Thing 3 </li>
Thing 4 <li>Thing 4</li>
Thing 5 <li>Thing 4</li>

</ul>

Calls to Action (CTAs)

Depending on your various strategic goals, you will want to consider incorporating calls to action or CTAs in all of your blog posts or articles.

CTAs literally call a reader to action and ask them to perform some action. CTAs come in two flavors.

Transitional CTAs prompt a reader to move from awareness to consideration. These CTAs may promote some sort of offer or give your reader something in return e.g. Learn More, Download Free PDF, Start 14-Day Free Trial. These CTAs are great for educating and nurturing readers while getting them closer to making a decision.

A direct CTA is an explicit declaration to a reader that prompts them to take explicit action e.g. Buy Now, Call Now, Schedule an Appointment. These CTAs tell a reader exactly what will happen if they decide to click the button. These are intended for when your reader is ready to make a decision.

External Links

It’s important to give credit where credit is due. In the web-world, you give another source credit by linking to them. In fact, the number of other websites/web properties that link to your site contributes to how well your content ranks. We call these, backlinks.

A crucial component of writing is research. Without question, you will look to other blog posts and web-related articles for inspiration or information regarding your topic. This is all a part of the content creation process, but beware of who you decide to link to from your blog post or article.

Since the rise of the internet, anyone and everyone can contribute content. This means that the burden to find the original source, the best source of original truth, rests on the copywriter’s shoulders. When possible, always try to track down the most original and authoritative sources. They’re the ones who deserve your precious link juice.

Internal Links

Links to other web properties are important, but equally if not more important are internal links. These are links you provide to your reader that take them to other, related articles that you’ve written that exist on your website.

Internal links help promote reader engagement. If the reader finds the article they’re currently reading useful, then why not give them the opportunity to read other articles related to that subject? The more time a reader spends engaging with your content, the more likely they are to turn to you when they’re ready to buy.

Whenever possible, consider including several internal links to other pages of your website from your blog post or article.

Media

When we think of blogs and content today, we’re not just talking about written content. A blog or article may now include various pieces of visual media including embedded YouTube videos, infographics, charts, interactive displays, and more.

Consider using these various types of media throughout your blog or article as a means of increasing engagement and facilitating conversions (getting a reader to do a thing). Alternative forms of media are a great, additional way to make complex ideas clear.

Resources

“Building a Story Brand” - Donald Miller (2017).
CopyHackers.com - Copywriting resources
Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post - HubSpot
How to Write High-Level Blog Posts That Don’t Overwhelm Your Readers - HubSpot
Content Marketing Certification - HubSpot