Want to Be a Better Blogger? Embrace Structure

It’s no lie that blogging is a great Internet marketing and content marketing strategy to engage with your audience. What is the first step you take as you begin writing a blog post? Lots of people just like to start at the beginning — they stare down the blinking cursor until they’re suddenly inspired to write a clever introduction.

However, this isn’t always the best way to start a blog post. Instead, it can be much better to create the structure of the blog post before doing anything else. First, you write a few large headers as the main blog post sections and maybe add a few smaller tags as sub-sections. Then, all you’ve got to do is fill in the blanks.

Though counterintuitive, structure actually is better for both you and your readers. Rachel Sprung, column writer for HubSpot.com provides great reasons as to why structure is key for blog writing.

Benefits of Having Structure

You’re More Productive

Even the most productive writers can be sabotaged by distractions — but a disorganized writer begets a disorganized post.

Before you begin writing, outline your blog post. This will make it much easier for you down the road. Use bullet points for topics and headings you want to use. Then go back in fill in the content and put it in a cohesive order. By creating your blog post content in this order, you will actually be much more productive. If you try to focus on your content, structure, and formatting at the same time, it will be much more challenging to accomplish everything.

But by getting your outline first, then your structure and formatting, and then your content, you will be much more productive and efficient with what you’re working on.

You Can Produce More Content

It takes a lot of time to format your post by adding H2 and H3 HTML tags, coming up with optimized headers, figuring out if you should have a numbered list vs. a bulleted list, etc. But when structure is set for you from the beginning, you can actually save a lot of time that would have otherwise been spent adjusting the format of your blog post, and use that time to create more content. By having a consistent format and structure for different types of blog posts, you will actually free yourself up to write more content in the future.

You Have More Freedom to be Creative

Once you have the structure out of the way, you can focus all of your attention on what you write. You’re not focusing on how to cram a ton of stuff into a blog post — you’re looking to make the most of whatever you’ve decided to be in there.

It’s Easier for Readers to Follow

When someone looks at a structured and properly formatted blog post, it’s really easy to read. You know what the main points are. You can pull out some of the points that expand on the main section through the sub-headers. And you can easily scan the blog post to understand the point the writer is trying to make. As much as we don’t want to admit that our readers scan our content, they do. Clear and identifiable structure makes it easy for people to scan.

If you business would like help setting up your blog, ideas for blog posts or any other Internet marketing needs, let’s talk! We can help your company enhance its online presence.

Read the full article by Rachel Sprung.