How to Write for Blogs (Even if You Struggle with Writing)

If you want to know how to write for blogs, then let’s go over everything you need to know. Even if you struggle with writing, you can put out a great blog post using the information below. 

But before we get to that: 

There’s really only one main secret to writing a great blog post. 

Make it conversational. 

Pretend like you’re writing to a friend. 

You don’t need a PhD in English, you just need to get your point across in a way that’s easy to understand. 

With that said, let’s go over some of the main questions people ask when looking to understand how to write for blogs. Maybe you have these questions too? 

Let’s get to it! 

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How Do You Structure a Blog Post?

The way you structure a blog post depends on what it’s meant to do. But there are a few things that every blog post will want to have:

• A compelling headline
• An intro
• Meaty content with answers to questions
• A conclusion
• A call to action

Let’s take a look at each of these in a little more detail.

1. A Compelling Headline.

There’s a lot of competition out there in the blogging world, so how are you going to stand out? How are you going to make people want to click on your blog post? With a compelling headline.

There are many formulas you could use for a compelling headline.

A few examples are:

• How to [Outcome] – How to Write for Blogs
• X Ways to [Outcome] – 10 Ways to Write for Blogs
• X Ways to [Outcome] (Obstacle) – 10 Ways to Write for Blogs (Even if You’ve Never Written a Blog Post Before)
• X [Topic] Mistakes – 5 Blog Writing Mistakes

These are just a few ideas. You can look to these resources for more:

• Buzzfeed (they are the king of compelling headlines)
• Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer (Does your headline tug at the heartstrings?)
• Thrive University Headline Swipe File (Amazing resource for Thrive Themes Members)

You can also look at the headlines when you’re doing your own personal Google searches. What makes you click on a particular post and why?

2. An Intro

An intro into your blog post sets the tone and gets your reader excited about what’s to come. Ideally, you’ll want to keep your intro short with short paragraphs.

Here’s a little trick I learned from Brian Dean at Backlinko…

Use bucket brigades in your copy, especially in your intro.

He says to use them to break up content that may be boring.

For instance:

That’s a bucket brigade.

Brian says it’s an old copywriting technique that still works today.

3. Meaty Content with Questions to Answers

You want to be as thorough as possible when writing your blog posts.

Why?

Two reasons:

1. Google likes it. And if Google likes it, then you have a chance to rank in Google. Which means you’ll have more readers looking at your blog post. (If your intent is to promote something, that means more chance to make sales.)
2. You want to be relevant. You want to help a reader answer questions in their minds. I have a couple of strategies of how to find out what questions people are asking. We’ll go over those below in the section “How Do You Write Quality Content for a Blog”.

4. A Conclusion

The conclusion ties up your thoughts into a neat little package. But that’s not its only purpose. The other purpose is to give a nice summary for the scroll-to-the-bottomers out there. (I admit it. I do it too!)

You can put everything together in a couple of short paragraphs and add your call to action right there for those people who just can’t read it all. (Yup. I get it.)

5. A Call to Action

You want to direct your reader to an action at the end of your blog post. Do you want them to comment? Sign up for your newsletter? Click a link to a product you recommend? Click on another post?

That’s your call to action. You should have one main call to action as to not confuse readers and give them too many options. I don’t always follow this rule.

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How Do You Write Quality Content for a Blog?

Writing quality content for a blog is really just about finding out what readers are looking for. How do you do that? I have a few ideas for you.

1. Keyword research.

Keyword research allows you to see what people are looking for when they are searching on Google (and other search engines). I use an awesome tool called Jaaxy to perform this research. I’ll show you.

Let’s say your blog is on baking. Maybe you want to create a blog post on baking an apple pie. I go into my handy dandy Jaaxy keyword research tool and this is what I see:

I’ve come up with two awesome keywords that I can target in my blog post and it took me about 2 minutes. I can even dig deeper from here to find even more.

Let’s go over why these are good keyword phrases to target.

• Avg = the average traffic that keyword gets per month on Google
• Traffic = the amount of traffic you can expect to get if you ranked #1 for that term on Google
• QSR (Quoted Search Results) = how competitive the keyword is. The smaller the number, the better!
• KQI (Keyword Quality Indicator) = taking all factors into consideration, how good this keyword is and if you should use it
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) = how likely you are to rank on page 1 of Google for this keyword. The higher the number, the better!

Want to try it yourself? Just type in a keyword phrase to see what you come up with:

 

You can use these other free tools, too:

• Ubersuggest
• Answer the Public

2. Use Quora

Quora is a question and answer website where users can ask questions about anything, and people who have knowledge about the topic can answer.

If your blog is on dog training, you can go into Quora and see what people are asking.

For example:

You can use these questions for blog topics and then you can come to Quora and you can answer these questions yourself for extra promotion.

3. Use Google

This is one of my favorite ways to come up with blog topics. There are a couple of great techniques you can use with Google.

• Alphabet Soup technique
• Scroll-to-the-bottom-of-the-page technique (Fine…it’s called Searches Related, but that’s more boring)
• PAA technique

1. Alphabet Soup

This technique is a lot of fun! You go to Google, start to type in your topic and then you go through the alphabet. Let me show you. The topic of this post is “how to write for blogs”. I can go into Google and type “how to write for blogs a” and see what comes up for the letter a:

You continue to do that through the entire alphabet to see what comes up. You’ll get more ideas than you’ll know what to do with!

2. Searches Related

After you type in your blog topic, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page on Google. There you will see a list of related results. You can use these as blog topics.

3. PAA

PAA stands for People Also Ask. These are the questions that people are asking for related to your topic.

Do you think I used some of these for this blog post? Heck yea, I did! Google is practically handing content ideas to you on a silver platter.

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How to Find Blog Topics?

The previous section went over the different topics you can focus on in a particular blog post. But that’s for a post where you already have a main topic.

What if you want to blog, but you don’t know what to blog about? From the start?

First, in order to know what blog topics to tackle, you need to know your niche. A niche is a target audience. It’s important to find your niche if you’re writing a blog, and especially if you’re writing your blog for money.

You want to connect and talk to the right group of people, otherwise it’s going to be hard to attract the right people (or any people) to your blog.

Here’s a lesson on how to choose a niche. (You’ll just need to enter your name and email address to access it.)

If you have your niche already, then use the previous section to find topics within your niche.

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How Can I Blog to Make Money?

If you’re wondering, “how can I blog to make money?”, then let me assure you that it’s not only possible, but many, many people are doing it and doing it successfully.

One blogging couple I follow, Alex & Lauren of createandgo.com, put out their July 2019 income report. They made over $123,000. Just in the month of July.

Of course, not everyone will reach that level of success and some will be even more successful. I’m just telling you that it’s possible.

There are 4 main ways to make money blogging:

1. Ads
2. Sponsored Posts
3. Products or Services
4. Affiliate Marketing

My personal favorite is affiliate marketing and what this site is focused on, so we’ll talk about that in a little more detail.

Related: How To: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

Here are some things you’ll need to learn in order to make money with your blog using affiliate marketing:

1. Your target audience / your niche
2. The process of making money online
3. How to build a website and get it ready for search engines
4. Understanding Keywords
5. How to write compelling content
6. Creating a brand for your site
7. Understanding affiliate networks
8. Understanding ad networks
9. Social media marketing
10. The importance of comments for SEO

You could go out and scour the internet looking at each of these topics, but i don’t recommend that. The reason is that I think it will get confusing and you’ll want to go off on tangents looking at too many things and you will have a hard time focusing on exactly what you need to do for each step.

That’s why I recommend the training platform, Wealthy Affiliate. They give you the exact roadmap to take and all you need to do is follow it step-by-step.

Plus they have web hosting included (for Premium Members), 24/7 technical support and a community of over 1 million like-minded people which is seriously invaluable.

You can give it a try for free.

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Is Blogging Profitable in 2019?

Blogging is profitable in 2019, and I personally believe it will only get bigger and better as time goes on because more and more people will get online around the world.

There are currently something like 4 billion people online searching for things every day. If you can tap into your niche and help them with the things they’re searching for, it can be wildly profitable for you too.

There is so much opportunity online, and it’s not going to slow down any time soon.

I mentioned Alex & Lauren in the previous article and how much they made. Let’s see what some other bloggers have done recently.

• Two Wandering Souls = $17,811 June 2019
• Do You Even Blog? – $2,866 March 2019
• Healthy, Savvy and Wise – $22,288 May 2019

These are just a few examples I found online.

How about Wealthy Affiliate members? That’s the training platform I mentioned above that I recommend. I’ve done a couple of success story blog posts. You can ready those here:

• 11 Affiliate Marketing Success Stories that Will Knock Your Socks Off
• Wealthy Affiliate Success Stories (11 More Incredible Stories)

So the answer is yes, people do VERY well online. It takes consistency, focus, perseverance, and a willingness to learn, adapt and change.

But it’s not a bad way to earn an income.

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How Do Beginner Blogs Make Money?

The most important thing when you’re first starting out in the blogging world is to understand your audience and how blogging works in general.

You want to follow a proven step-by-step path that works so that you don’t get frustrated and quit too easily.

As a beginner blogger, it may take you some time to make money because:

1. You need to learn the ropes
2. You need to build up your skills
3. Search engines need to learn to trust you

Let’s talk about that third point.

Search Engines Need to Learn to Trust You

A few years ago, you could create a blog, throw a bunch of keywords onto it, and it would rank in Google pretty quickly. But then those blogs would disappear and Google would be left hanging with broken blogs.

So they implemented a kind of probation for new bloggers. That way, they could see if the blogger was serious enough to stick around and actually provide good content to its users. Some people refer to this as the Google Sandbox, which you can read about here and here.

It’s going to take a new blog anywhere from 3 months to a year for Google to start ranking your posts. (Bing and Yahoo are a little more relaxed about this.) This is why you need patience as a blogger!

You can speed up the process of getting traffic to your site if you pay for it, but keep in mind that it can be risky and you may lose a good amount of money before you get the hang of it.

That’s why it’s recommended to learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a beginning blogger so that you don’t end up losing your shirt to the ad platforms. It just takes more time.

Remember above I said there are 4 main ways that bloggers make money:

1. Ads
2. Sponsored Posts
3. Products & Services
4. Affiliate Marketing

All of these ways are going to require you to have traffic to your site. You need people to see what you’re offering before anyone can buy from you.

So, as a beginning blogger, your number 1 priority is to learn how to work with the search engines and learn how to get the right traffic to your website.

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Conclusion

I hope this post gave you some great ideas about how to write for blogs. If you’re writing blogs just for the fun of it, there really aren’t any rules that you need to follow. Write and have fun with it!

If you’re writing blogs for money, then it’s a different ballgame. You’ll need to know who you’re writing for (your niche / audience), what they’re looking for and how you can help them and how to write content with intent. You’ll also need to know how to play nice with the search engines.

If it sounds daunting and confusing, it’s really not if you follow a proven, step-by-step path. That’s why I recommend Wealthy Affiliate. They give you all the tools, training and support that you need to create a successful blog. With over 1 million members, they must be doing something right!