Writing a Blog Post: A Simple Formula to Follow
1) Understand your audience.
Before you start to write, have a clear understanding of your target audience. What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them?
2) Start with a topic and working title.
Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start with. For example, if you’re interested in food justice and policy, you might start out thinking about access to food or worker rights. Then you might come up with a few different working titles — in other words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing. A working title will guide your post so you can start writing. Even though the working title may not end up being the final title, it still provides enough information so you can focus your blog post on something more specific than a generic, overwhelming topic.
3) Write an intro (and make it captivating).
First, grab the reader’s attention. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs — or even sentences — of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they’ve given your post a fair shake. You can do this in a number of ways: tell a story about a real person or situation, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.
Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives.
4) Organize your content.
Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information. The trick is to organize the info so readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. The organization can take multiple forms — sections, lists, tips, whatever’s most appropriate. But it must be organized! To complete this step, all you really need to do is outline your post. That way, before you start writing, you know which points you want to cover, and the best order in which to do it.
5) Write!
The next step — but not the last — is actually writing the content. Use your outline as a guide and be sure to expand on all of your points as needed. Write about what you already know, and if necessary, do additional research to gather more information.
6) Edit/proofread your post, fix your formatting and add picturess.
The editing process is an important part of blogging — don’t overlook it. Ask a grammar-conscious class mate to copyedit and proofread your post. I will also review but please don’t send me a really rough draft. Get help first. Be sure to break up long strings of text with section titles. And include:
Featured Image
Make sure you choose a visually appealing and relevant image for your post. As social networks treat content with images more prominently, visuals are now more responsible than ever for the sucess of your blog content in social media.
Topics/Tags
Tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post. They also allow readers to browse for more content in the same category on your blog. Refrain from adding a laundry list of tags to each post. Instead, put some thought into a tagging strategy. Think of tags as “topics” or “categories,” and choose 4-5 tags that represent all the main topics you want to cover on your blog.
Sample Blogs Maintained by John Gerber
- Just Food Now (http://justfoodnowwma.com/) – Regional food and farming with a focus on food justice and sustainable agriculture. Average readership = 500 per month.
- Grow Food Amherst (http://www.growfoodamherst.org/news/) – local topics of interest related to gardening, sustainable living and local food and farming. Average readership = 500 per month.
- Sustainable Food and Farming (http://sustfoodfarm.org/) – for students and potential students interested in the major. Average readership = 4000 per month.
- Sustainability Education Worldwide (http://johngerber.world.edu/) – World.edu is an international blog focused on sustainability in higher education. I am their sustainable agriculture writer. Average readership = 5000 per month.