How to Write a Blog Post People Will Love: Part 1

Blogging is a powerful way to share your expertise and establish yourself as a thought leader. My blog, as an example, has led to speaking invitations, consulting projects, publication opportunities and more.

What does it take to write a great blog post?

Here are tips to write a post that people will love. Sometimes the hardest part is getting over the fear. But what makes your post stand out comes in the editing process. During the writing process, the most important thing is to simply get the words down.

You may need to silence your inner critic until you do that. Just suspend that self-critical voice until you have a first draft completed. Write continuously for a set period of time, such as 60 minutes.

Set your draft aside and come back to it, ideally a day later and at least an hour later. You may find yourself pleasantly surprised that your first draft is much better than you expected.

This is all worth it in light of the benefits of blogging. Bestselling author Dorie Clark cites content creation as one of the three pillars of “standing out in a noisy world.”

It enables you to share your hard-won expertise, establishing you as a person with a valuable point of view. As a result, interesting career opportunities may come your way.

Here’s how to get started.

Have a theme

This is about having a strategy for what you blog about. By focusing in one area, you will be better able to build up a devoted readership over time. Be clear on why you’re writing and who you want to reach. Once you have your topic identified, you can relate almost anything to that subject.

It’s okay for your focus to evolve as your career does. My blog began as an exploration of the future of corporate communications. When my job changed after a corporate acquisition, I wrote about marketing analytics for a short time. Ultimately that wasn’t something I wanted to spend hours of my weekend and evening time on, so then I explored how people learn.

After that I had a serendipitous moment at a leadership conference. Reese Witherspoon, the entrepreneur, producer and actor, talked about the white space in social media to work with people on building their reputations.

It was my “a-ha” moment. I knew what I wanted to focus on – writing, consulting and speaking about what successful people do in social media to boost their careers.

Share your point of view

People read blogs to learn, to be entertained and to be surprised by a new twist. Think about the point of view you can bring to your topic. You don’t have to be an expert to start blogging about it. If you’re fascinated by it and dedicated to learning in the process, you can bring value to your audience.

Your point of view is why people will read your posts. No one else except for you has had your unique experience in the work world. What you’ve learned and experienced along the way can be helpful to others.

Come up with a compelling headline

You could write the best blog post in the world, but if no one reads it, your light and your ideas haven’t truly reached the world. As I learned by experimenting, it’s important to devote almost as much time to creating a compelling headline as you do to writing the overall post.

There are headline analyzers such as CoSchedule that can help you improve  your headlines to attract more readers. It’s almost a gamified approach, if you keep entering headlines to increase your score. Try to write 25 headlines for every blog post. Then pick the best one.

Of course, your headline has to be true to your subject. No clickbait for you. Deliver to your readers what your headline promises.

Focus on the first few words

The first first words and sentences have to pique your readers’ interest from the start. There’s no time to warm up and get to the point. Spend as much time on your lead as you do on your headline. What are the opening words and sentences that will grab a reader’s interest?

Those first few lines show up now for LinkedIn articles in your profile. Carefully consider what you want your first 30 words to say.

Get the length right

About 600 to 800 words is ideal. This is approximately the length of a newspaper op-ed article. It’s okay, though, to go shorter or longer if your topic warrants it. For something really long, you can break it into a series, as I did for my bio posts and my research on social media.

Since this post has hit that limit, watch for the remaining tips in a part 2 post coming soon.