How to Write a Blog Post for Beginners in Six Steps

For the past few weeks, we have published over a dozen blog posts and have fine-tuned a process to get content written to a high quality. Anyone can write content, but here’s how to write a blog post to build an audience.

The perfect type of blog post is one that you can write without having to do any research; it’s a brain dump of your skills and experiences that you want to share with people in the same situation as you once were.

Step 1: Topic and keyword research

We aren’t discussing finding your target audience or choosing a niche because we’ve mentioned this many times in our audience-building articles. You can check those out and learn more about finding your fans.

Think about questions that your audience might have. What challenges will they face that you can help them overcome? Think about the niche and spend 10 minutes coming up with a topic you want to write about.

Once you have a topic, like how to write a blog post, the following step is to do some keyword research, and there are two steps to this:

Use a tool like Ahrefs to find questions and search terms that people are using on the search engines like Google and Bing. Look for search terms that are searched but are not overly competitive. If it is competitive, try to develop a more long-tail search term.

Go to Google and search the terms you’ve come up with. Look for more specific suggestions in the FAQs that appear in the search results. Scroll down to the related searches and look for other widely searched terms.

Bear in mind that tools like Ahrefs gather data from an array of sources, so if a search term has zero searches, don’t assume it is not going to send any traffic. Do that final step and look in the Google search results.

Step 2: Write the Title and Subtitles

You now know the topic you want to write about. The next step is to develop a title that is eye-catching but also includes the targeted search term you have identified as part of the keyword research.

Once you have come up with the title, the next step is to write down the subtitles of the blog post.

This will keep you focused when writing and also ensure that you cover all the content your reader will expect to be included.

Steps 1 and 2 should take you 10-15 minutes.

Step 3: Brain dump and write

The following steps should be completed in no more than 60 minutes, depending on the length of your blog post. At Creator Trail, we try to include everything we want to teach you within 500-700 words, although this post will likely be longer!

We recommend that for this step, you just type. Dump out all of those experiences, knowledge and skills that you want to share with your audience. Do not worry about grammar or spelling mistakes – don’t think about the blog post’s structure – just write what comes naturally.

Once you feel you have written everything, you can move on to the next step. Do not overthink this; just write and brain dump!

Step 4: Restructure your content

Start to restructure the content, so it’s easy to read.

Reduce the size of paragraphs, making it easy for the reader to scan through and consume the content quickly. Look out for long sentences that might be difficult to read.

Step 5 – Proofreading and editing

At Creator Trail, we use a tool called Grammarly for proofreading, and it saves us so much time. It suggests words that drastically improve the quality of the content we publish.

We’ve upgraded to the Pro version because it provides us with complete proofreading of spelling and grammar mistakes – plus helps us make sure that the structure of the sentences makes sense.

Honestly, while we get a commission if you purchase the Pro version, you do not need to because, as a free tool, it is incredible and will take your writing to a new level. Seriously, use this to proofread your content.

Once we’ve run through all of the errors and suggestions from Grammarly, ensure you read through the blog post again. While AI is improving, it is not always 100% perfect, so it’s essential to have a human proofread too.

Step 6 – Creating your blog post

To be honest, there is another long blog post that we need to write about creating and publishing your blog post.

So we’re going to keep this section brief for now.

Learn about on-page optimization because the search terms and titles you created at the beginning of this process need to be included within your content. Not in a spammy way, but write it naturally within the blog post.

If you are using WordPress (which are more than likely are), then we highly recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin. Within the post editor, you can enter your targeted search term, and it will offer suggestions to improve the on-page optimization. It’s an invaluable plugin.

We will leave it there and update this article when we have published what part two of how to write a blog post for beginners is.