The Global Journey: Part 3 - Writing Awesome Blog Posts

The Global Journey is a set of posts chronicling our journey from one country to the world, from national to international, from one ocean to....you get the idea. Follow along on our journey which will feature the good and the bad with a little hilarious in between. Sign up for notifications when a new post is added by clicking on the button that looks like thison the bottom left of the website.

Prefer to start from the beginning? Start from Part 1 by clicking here.

After making a beautiful website, writing interesting content, particularly blog content, gives our website that umph to get people as excited as we are about what we do and who we are. We spend a lot of time writing blog posts and other content to attract people to our website and bring back people who've visited us before. And while writing for a blog may not come naturally to the average bear, writing about something you love and conveying that love in your writing is essential to a great blog post. If you're an artist writing about canvas textures, that will be a much more interesting read than if you're an artist writing about replacing bathroom tiles - unless you're like Natalie Blake Studios who do some amazing artistic work with tiles.

So let's break down how we write blog posts into small mini-cookie size steps.

The Idea

When writing a blog post, don't worry about amount of words and supplementary items like images, videos or other multimedia. Start with a simple idea. A sentence describing that idea will do. For this post our idea was "How to write a blog post without a bunch of confusing marketing speak."

The Potatoes

Now this is a little bit of a matter of preference. Many gurus and experts will advise to start with an intro. But we here at @Assist have found that after coming up with the idea, the next thing we naturally do is think about the direction we would like the post to take.

If there are steps, much like the ones in this post, we'll decide the title of each step with some notes on what could be talked about in each step. If there aren't steps, we'll instead start formulating what exactly it is that we want the post to say in point form.

The Meat

Now that we have our points to follow, the next step is to start formulating our content. As you write, your points can change and so can the entire idea. Save multiple versions until you're happy with the result.

A typical @Assist blog post may have 3 or 4 versions of various paragraphs before we land on our final version.

The End

With our meat and potatoes finished (see what we did there?) we typically like to figure out a question we'd like to leave our audience with. It's always good to end on a question to invite discussion in your comments section. If you don't have a comments section, get one. Comments are in integral part of a blog and promote return visits and healthy communication between you and your readers. Ensure you respond to every single comment.

You can easily integrate comments into your website using a great service like the one we use, Disqus.

The Beginning

Now that your blog post is just about done, work on an awesome intro to it all. Make your point, bring up something controversial but most importantly, peak your reader's interest. If they don't like your intro, they won't read the rest. And what a shame that would be.

The Title

Let's be honest, titles are hard. How do you entice someone in just a few words to read your article? The answer is Google.

Open up your browser and do a search. Let's say you're writing that article on replacing bathroom tiles. What would someone typically search for if they were looking for information on replacing bathroom tiles? Likely it's "How to replace bathroom tiles." But how do we know this? When you've Google searched in past, you may have noticed that Google tries to guess what you might be typing into it's search bar. Use that! That's what people are search for!

You can spice up by adding "in x simple steps" to entice readers to choose your article in search results.

The Stuffing

Now that you've got a great article, choose some photos to supplement your content. If you're a gif lover, don't go overboard. Animated gifs are super fun, but they are also super large and can make a page take forever and a day to load (in internet time). Limiting your use of them will go a long way to keeping your readers happy.

So now that you've got an awesome blog post (and/or have finished a bag of cookies), why not share it? We love reading awesome posts, so go on and post your link with a comment in the comment section below. After you've done that, feel free to browse some of our other awesome blog posts and let us know what you think!

Click here to view The Global Journey: Part 4 - Marketing for Success.