Blogs are a vital way of growing your audience, engendering trust and connection, and establishing you as the go-to authority amongst your peers. If you aren’t already regularly blogging because you don’t like writing, don’t have time, or can’t wrap your head around taking on yet another task, the good news is you can write great blogs in only 6 steps, putting your business into the ideal position for growth.
Have you ever landed on a website for a business or a writer that doesn’t have blogs? You can practically hear the tumbleweeds blowing through. What a lost opportunity to show up and engage with their audience.
In contrast, a business website or a writer’s website that has up-to-date blogs makes those entities seem engaged, current, and authoritative. We trust them because they’re putting themselves out there to serve their community.
In “How to Grow Your Business with Blogs: 3 Ways,” I list the 3 ways blogs are key to launching your business into a higher category:
By making blog writing part of your business operations, you will see greater reach, sales, and reputation. And it takes only 6 steps to get great blogs out into the world every time.
Before you write a word, you have to wrap your head around the reality of the process, namely that it is a process.
If you’re a typical business owner, you’re used to doing things well and quickly.
But writing great blogs doesn’t work that way. They operate more like a puzzle, which comes together in stages:
You dump the pieces out onto the table
Sift through them and begin grouping them by shape or color.
Slowly begin joining them, one at a time, until eventually an image forms.
Because you expect puzzles to be a process, you are at peace with it. If you were to open a puzzle box and the whole thing plunked out fully assembled, you’d be annoyed and take it back to the shop for a refund.
Blogs work the same way. They don’t plunk out of you fully formed; they have to be poured out, sifted through, and come together, one piece at a time.
(Not even professional authors type happily, hit “Print,” whip the pages off to their publisher, and go celebrate their great day with a smoothie. They have to sweat and slog through the steps of the process like anyone).
Problems like writer’s block, impostor syndrome, or putting off your blog writing arrive when you aren’t prepared for your blog to need to go through the stages.
Wrapping your head around the fact that each step of the process is necessary for you to ultimately write something meaningful and resonant for your audience will manage your expectations and help you get all the way to the end.
Now that you have the right mindset: that writing great blogs every time is a process, you are ready to begin!
Writer Anne Lamott in her excellent book on writing, Bird by Bird, quotes a friend of hers who named the full drafting process as this:
The first draft is the “down draft,” when you’re simply getting your ideas down onto the page. In this phase, you are essentially translating the swirling mass of ideas in your head into language. That translation process—taking something from one state to another—is an ungainly and messy one that is more than humbling to look at afterwards. Disjointed ideas, tangents, misspellings- it’s always a real muddle.
You’re probably accustomed to writing things efficiently and moving on, so if you hold that expectation, once you see what’s poured out of you, you may feel upset, get blocked, or stop writing altogether thinking you can’t hack it.
That’s where having very low expectations comes in. A stiff pep talk before writing to remind yourself of a few things will help:
Letting it all hang out can be easier said than done. Even though you intellectually know that writing a great blog every time is a process and that the first draft needs to be blurted out, if you’re a perfectionist or the habit of making your writing “perform” right away is too ingrained, you may need some strategies to help you.
In “The 3 Best Strategies for Generating Great Writing,” I share the most useful hacks for overriding your perfectionism so you can allow your first thoughts to hit the page.
Try these (most people swear by the Birdcage method), and you’ll be well on your way to an excellent blog.
Ultimately, just like you wouldn’t expect your toddler at baby gymnastics to land a double twist double back layout in their floor routine, you shouldn’t expect your first draft to act like a final draft. It’s not realistic, and you’ll only end up frustrated.
Aim low, go with the flow, and know you’ll soon have a great blog arrive out of all that material—material that now exists because you let it.
After you’ve dumped your ideas out into your down draft, it’s best not to hunch over it and begin to work it into shape right away.
Spend some time apart so you can return to your blog with fresh eyes for the “up draft” (or the revision process).
If you’ve ever read something a few times and it began to swirl, that’s because your brain became too familiar with it, disabling your ability to be constructive.
You need your first draft to look unfamiliar again so you can find the essence of it and edit it properly. Sleeping on it for a night or two (or in a pinch taking a few hours) is the best way to do this.
The good news to write great blogs you don’t need to conquer the world; you only need to speak to one issue, one question, or one topic.
Tip: if it’s in the title, that’s what you should write about.
While the modern idea is blogs should skew longer for improved SEO, you still want to keep things trim and streamlined around that one point.
Now: when you return to your crappy draft to turn it into your “up draft,” you may see quite a bit of off-roading.
This is not only fine; it’s great! Now you can trim away everything that is tangential and pop it into another file to use it for a different blog later on.
*You may also realize that the blog you’d set out to write and what you actually wrote are two different things.
This is a great problem to have as well; you can decide whether to honor the new content and turn that into the blog you’ll work on now or to chop it all away for a later blog and write filler material for the blog you’d intended to write.
Tip: If while writing filler or transitional material you sense you’re deviating from the blog’s topic, refer back to its title as many times as you need to stay on track.
Some blogs, like those written by fiction or narrative nonfiction writers, are more creative and wending like personal essay. Others, like those written by business owners, typically solve a problem, provide helpful information, or answer a question. These latter blogs need to get to the point. (They can still be conversational in tone, but the information should be streamlined and direct to be useful to your reader).
Note: You have mere seconds to arrest your reader’s attention. Think about how much time in a day you have to read blogs (None. You have no time), so let the reader know you’ve got what they need immediately.
Following that, speak to the solution or next steps, which you will go on to explore in the blog body.
The body: Keep the body to the point that you established in the open. Use sub-headers to stay on track and keep your points clear.
You can also divide a longer, more complex topic into parts or a series. Everyone loves a cliffhanger, so this gives you a built-in audience return visit.
The end: Sum up, invite your reader to do something (your “call to action”) and get out gracefully.
Blogs also have numerous technological requirements to be identified by Google as “useful” to readers.
Here’s a full list to include in your blog and how: “An Easy 4-Step Process to Prep and Publish Your Blog.”
Finally, you’ve arrived at the last step, the “dental draft.” In this last stage, you squint, get mean, and check every tooth of your blog (or proofread it).
The best proofreading method hands-down is to read the blog aloud yourself first, and get another person to read it second.
Tip: Never post your blog until you’ve gotten the “all-clear” from a second reader. *Nope, not overkill. Have you heard of “Semantic Satiation?”
Consider this: you could be a brilliant contractor/florist/therapist, but if your blog has errors, you will be planting the idea in your reader that if you are careless with your writing, you are careless in your work.
Is this fair? No. But it is so. Readers will consider you less careful generally, or simply have a sense that something is off or missing, which will bleed into how they feel you may perform your job/service.
Creating a “blog posse” of trusted friends/colleagues or getting an editor to do a quick pass of the material will ensure you’re posting the best quality blog possible.
Throughout this blog on how to write great blogs every time in only 6 steps, you may have been holding in the back of your mind the idea that you could simply get ChatGPT or another AI platform to write your blogs for you.
Seriously, how easy would that be? Why go through all the trouble of doing the work yourself?
What you may have noticed in your travels is that you can always spot an AI-generated blog. They’re just a little weird, a little “off.” They are usually stiff or thin or simply don’t feel like a warm-blooded person talking to you from the page.
Humans interpret subjectively, AI computes objectively.
Do these blogs satisfy technological criteria enough to get your website ranked for SEO? Maybe. But where an AI-generated blog fails the business owner is in authenticity. Human connection. A feeling of intimacy, which fosters trust, which brings in sales and engagement.
If you decide to use AI as a tool to help you plan a blog or to give you stats or additional info you may include as a source, that’s not going to harm the tone or essence of the blog you write, but in the end, bear in mind it’s people we buy from and people we trust and want to do business with.
Give to your audience, and you will see far better results than if you fill your site with blog content generated by a machine.
All in all, this 6-step method to write a great blog every time enables you to write your first draft more or less inside of a morning (and have some fun doing it); from there, it’s structural smoothing, tweaking and finessing, and a last level gaze before you hit “publish.”
Regular blogging is a vital part of caring for your business. It fosters trust and goodwill; grounds your business and you as an authority figure; and establishes you as a collegial member of your field.
And like with all acquired skills, the more you blog, the easier it gets.
The outcome is more audience engagement, more sharing of your content to new audiences, and more visibility for your business overall. Everybody wins for the valuable information, and your community—and you—will be all the happier and more successful for it.
To learn blogging from the ground up, including generating several months of new blog content, sign up for our self-guided online course, The Blogshop.
In only 6 lessons, you will learn, schedule your blogs, understand the tech and tricks that go into successful blogging, and do incredible things for growing your business.
Our 4-month Mentored Book Programs, Online Courses, & Writing Coaching and Editing Hours. From November 21-27, 2023
