Writing Blog Posts – My Favourite Approach To Writing Blog Posts

After all these videos are figured it was time to write a regular blog post. So I’ll talk a bit about my favorite way to write blog posts and articles. What I like to do is do a bit of keyword research on the subject. I like to use Google’s external keyword tool. I like that tool because it’s free and since Google money by selling ads you can pretty much bet that it’s pretty accurate. I know I’ve talked about some of this before, but it is really important so, let’s get started.

Keyword Research

The first thing I’ll do is type my main keyword sentence into the Google external keyword tool. That gives me how wide range of key words to choose from. What I’m looking for here are some long tail keywords with decent traffic and low competition. Usually I’ll just pick one keyword, but if I do pick more than one, I make sure that they’re related. That’s the first and most important part of the research I do for my post.

Creating An Outline

When I’ve found the keywords I want to use, I’ll create the outline of my post. If I have more than one keyword, I’ll try to put them together in the most logical sequence. I’ll add some questions or points I want to make as additional sub headlines. If I only have one keyword, I’ll create somewhere between 5 and 10 sub headlines. I now have my entire blog post planned out.

Typing Until Your Fingers Bleed

At this stage it’s all about typing until my fingers are hurting. Well, ok. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but at this stage my job is to fill in the blanks. I’m not going to worry about additional research, spelling or grammatical issues at this stage. My main job is to fill up the blank screen that’s staring at me with as much text as possible. Some of it may be gibberish, but most of it will be great stuff that I can use without too much editing.

Editing Your Blog Post

Editing is important no matter what type of text, I want to release unto the world. The first thing I need to do is re-read the article. I need to take care of the parts of the article that simply don’t make sense. Either they are pure gibberish, or they are plain wrong. I need to see if I can salvage anything from these parts either through research or rewriting. Sometimes it’s not worth spending time to rewrite these parts, and then I’ll just remove them from my post.

The next thing I do is re-read the post again to find “factual grey areas”. These are the parts of the text that I need to verify through research. If my research verifies them, I’ll keep them. If not I’ll either rewrite or delete.

Finally, I’ll run my article through a spelling and grammar checker. I like to use WhiteSmoke, but there are other options out there. Another option is to let a friend or a relative proof read the blog post, but I think that’s slightly overkill for a blog post.

Publishing Your Masterpiece

This is it! This is where I log in to the admin module of my blog and publish my blog post. I like to use the WP-AutoTagger to get as many relevant tags as possible for my post. It’s also important that the category it’s posted in is relevant to the subject of the blog post. Finally, I may do some social bookmarking, create some RSS feeds, ping my blog at ping-o-matic and so on. The last steps are mainly to increase the traffic to my blog post though and have no real impact on the actual writing process.