4 Vital Things You Need to Do Before Writing a Blog Post

Many content writers will jump straight into writing a blog post without performing these vital tasks, which will increase your chances of it being discovered by your target audience. These tasks are also important because you want your content to be valuable and help people.

Make your content valuable

The content you write has to add value; it has to help people achieve a goal or teach a skill the reader wants to learn. Far too much-written content published online lacks value because the research wasn’t undertaken.

Keyword research tasks

You may have heard of the term “Keyword research” and thought, we will skip that and focus on writing the content instead.

As content creators, we want to focus on what we do best – creating content. That’s understandable, but you are setting yourself up to fail or dragging out the amount of time it will take you to build an audience.

It starts with these four tasks that need completing and can be done 30 minutes before you begin to write your next masterpiece.

Write a short overview

You need to ask yourself questions before starting to write the blog post. Write down your answers to these questions.

• What is the topic you want to write about?
• What type of content do you want to write?
• Who is your target audience for this post?
• What is the goal for the person reading the post?
• What do you want readers to do after reading?

Here’s an example:

You want to write a “how to” style blog post on detecting fake Pokemon cards. You’re targeting people who have an interest in Pokemon. The goal of the content is to stop people from being scammed.

After reading your blog post, you want the reader to sign up for your Pokemon collector’s email that you send out twice a month.

These five questions will help you focus on a specific topic your target audience is searching for in search engines.

Writing content that interests the people you want to attract is always essential. We’ve covered audience building, so check out those articles to learn about how to identify who your ideal readers are.

Brainstorming ideas

Next, you need to put yourself into the mind of your perfect reader.

What keyword phrases would they use on a search engine? Write down all of the different combinations of words that they could use. Also, think of action verbs that would improve your click-through rate.

Using bullet points, write down the areas you want to cover in the blog post on your chosen topic. Think of this a little like a script; write down subheaders and what you want to include in the content.

Look at your competition

When we say, look at your competition, we do not mean copying their title and copy. We suggest you use what works well as a model to create your unique style of content that helps the same audience.

For the keywords, you wrote down while brainstorming, go to Google and type them into the search bar.

As you look at each phrase, pay particular attention to the related searches, which can be found towards the bottom of the search results. Write those phrases down because people are using those to find content like you’re writing.

Also, look for featured snippets, usually a list of questions related to the keyword phrase you have searched. Again, write these questions down.

What titles and descriptions stand out?

Next, look at the search results on the first page.

Is there anything that stands out within the search results that you might want to include in your content? What titles are other content creators using? Do the descriptions stand out? Write those down too.

Visit 2-3 websites and look at the content; what areas do you think you could do better? What content is included that you need to make sure you cover? Does the blog post get a lot of social media shares?

Keyword research to gather data

At this stage, you will have an excellent idea of the topic, what you need to include in your blog post to make it valuable to your target audience, and a list of titles that you feel would help your content be discovered.

The next step is to use a few tools to develop a title and keyword phrase that you want to focus on within your blog post.

You can use many tools for keyword research, and to be completely honest, you cannot totally rely on them. We’ve asked you to research the actual search results because the posts on the first page will likely get traffic, so they are an excellent place to start.

Our favourite keyword discovery tool is Ahrefs. Enter a term, and the tool will create a list of keyword phrases, the number of searches, and how competitive they are. For the free version, you receive 10 results.

Taking ‘fake pokemon cards’ as an example, when you run this phrase through the tool, it comes up with terms like what fake pokemon cards look like, which receives around 600 searches a month and is not a hugely competitive term.

Use the data to find your keyword phrase

Make sure to write down the suggestions and use this data to help you decide what you want to use as your main keyword in the blog post.

When writing your content, ensure you include this keyword phrase 2-3 times, depending on the length of the blog post.

In a future article, we’ll go through the tasks needed to ensure that your content is optimized for search.

Hopefully, this article has given you insight into the vital tasks you need to do before writing your blog post. This article covers a lot, but the job need not take more than 30 minutes; it’s much needed to ensure that your target audience discovers your content.