Do you know why your writing has not improved?
Do you know what’s behind your boring blog writing that is not generating any views?
Well, maybe you have been focusing on the wrong things.
You’ve read from writing gurus on the internet that you need to do a lot of practice in order to become a better writer.
Guess what? That’s a poor approach and it will take you ages to improve.
In this era, you need to be smart and creative to become better.
In blogging, this comes down to creating systems for content creation that rocks the web.
And it starts with having a blog post structure; a post blueprint that guides on how you write your content.
This is something that most people really ignore, yet it’s the most effective route to creating content consistently.
But why really do you need block structure?
Well, first of all, it gives you direction, having a system to follow helps you reduce the number of decisions you need to make when writing content.
Secondly, it enables you to make your content creation process less time consuming, effective and efficient.
As mentioned, you only spend time organizing your words and ideas, not tinkering on what to write about after every section of your blog post.
A blog post structure also helps your readers to easily grasp what you are trying to tell them.
You organize your ideas in a smooth cadence which allows your blog readers to acquire the information.
Lastly, a unique and creative post structure helps your readers remember what you write about. You don’t just want people to read your content and move along the best way.
You want your ideas to stick in their minds for days or even weeks.
Having understood why a blog structure is essential for your content creation process. Let me help you build your blog post structure.
It starts with focusing on 4 factors. While there are numerous blog post types such as listicles, how-to-blogs, DIY articles and technical posts, the 4 factors still hold releance and must be considered for effective writing.
But you’ll need to build different structures and refine them to help you write blog posts that achieve their unique goals.
Here we go
1. The diminished focus of readers.
In today’s society, people’s focus has dropped due to the many distractions that exist, especially because of the phone.
Our focus is at the level of goldfish.
And this has shown its claws in the blogging space, where most of the content is not read even halfway.
It’s a fact that has taken effect and as a person who believes in playing by the rules rather than working against them, I will advise you to play the game accordingly.
To do this, design your blog structure to present information to your readers in an easy to read format. People are in a hurry. Serve them fast and clean.
Give them the most important information early on, you’ll have time to expand more on your ideas later for those interested. But for god’s sake, give them what they want fast.
If you try to fight this system, by creating content, which requires a lot of reading, you’re fighting a losing battle. They will bounce.
Make your paragraphs short. Have three sentences long for each paragraph. You can use 2 or 4 sometimes but try to be consistent. 3 is the ideal number of sentences that gives your articles a nice readability score.
Use bullet points when necessary. Bullet points enable readers to skim through your content easily.
In addition, use bold, short and precise headlines for your subtopics. Most readers look for the main tips and only read further if they find the subtopic interesting.
Your blog design also plays a huge part in the reading experience. Use simple font such as Arial and Times New Roman which are easily readable.
Don’t try to be fancy, especially when you have no idea on what types of fonts are most effective with readers.
Lastly, avoid unnecessary widgets, such as haphazardly placed share buttons which clutter the page and distract your readers while reading.
It is annoying and above all gives readers a bad experience which will affect your ranking.
All these tips should be considered when designing your blog post structure.
2. The interest of your readers.
To succeed in the ruthless and ever changing world of content marketing, you need to hook your readers .
Interesting and engaging content that stands above the rest isn’t a walk in the parke anymore. It’s become a skill people hone for years.
For any topic that you have in mind, there is somebody who has written about it. Most of this content is boring and banal. Most writers write for themselves. They forget to focus on the reader.
Yet creating interesting and engaging content is the only way to attract and maintain readers
So you need to hook them with your blog post structure and how do you do this?
First, use examples. Examples are the pinnacle of explanation. They give your readers something to relate to especially if it’s from real world experience.
Also make it an avenue for which your readers get to know more about you. It’s necessary in today’s world to have a personal voice in your blog. It helps your readers to connect with you. It is interesting. It elicits emotions.
Use interesting statistics, not all the time, just sparingly. Facts, especially with numbers can be very intriguing to readers. To magnify the effect, only mention mind-boggling statistics that will induce emotions, thoughts and keep your readers interested.
Use the three sentence rule. As discussed earlier, keep your paragraphs short and precise.
Use imagery. Research has shown that a post with a lot of images gets 94% more views than posts with plain text. Leverage on this opportunity, use intriguing images, images that provoke thoughts within your content to keep your readers engaged.
Infographics, for instance, are one the most effective content types because they feed information in small interesting bits while appealing to the visual mind of a person.
3. High quality and valuable content.
90% of content on the internet is not valuable, it is actually regurgitated content from other content.
Most of this content has not been well researched.
Most bloggers just write content for the sake of it. No agenda and no specific audience in mind. They just write.
You don’t wanna be one such blogger . So create a structure that will help you gather, analyze and write high quality and valuable content for your ideal customer.
And how do you do this?
It begins with your knowledge. How informed are you about the topics you wanna speak about.
And this depends on the research that you do on your topics. Do you study frequently? Do you research on trends or are you just waiting to be fed with information
When gathering information for your content writing process, research done to collect data implanted on your blog post is not good research.
Good research is the collection of information and finding a way to express it with your personal understanding, finding things that you can improve on and offering a new perspective to improve on that information.
When designing your blog structure, remember to consider activities to help you collect the right information, analyze it, and come up with ideas that can make it valuable. Then find how you will organize these ideas to flow well based on your blog post structure.
High quality content also involves a good blend of your own experiences and data. If you can do research and collect data, then you are bringing something extremely new to the industry.
If you cannot research, ensure that the content that exists on the internet can be rephrased in your own understanding, using your own experiences, and your own perspective.
Your experiences set you apart from the rest of the content. Let’s discuss this more in the next part.
Lastly, make sure you repurpose your content to other content types. It makes it multidimensional and adds points on your professionalism.
Content such as infographics are great at this and can attract many backlinks from other websites which build on your authority.
4. Personal touch or voice.
The one thing that is missing in most of today’s content is personal touch. Most content feels like it’s been written by established corporations who could care less about their customers.
Lets not forget AI is creating content automatically.
And most of this content is just crap. Honestly, AI hasn’t developed well enough to mimic human generated content.
It does not have any personal touch which humans crave for.
Which is why when you consider creating your content structure, you must focus on building a structure that capitalizes on you sharing information in your voice.
Personal voice expresses and evokes emotions. Content that triggers the emotional dimensions of a human being is much more memorable and easily remembered.
Your blog post structure should also allow you to tell a story in your own perspective.
While you might think that most of this content is not unique, having your own perspective and your own experiences, gives your content a different angle.
It is your USP (unique selling point)
Your unique experiences can prove very valuable in other people’s minds. They help your readers learn how to solve their pain points easily as they know you care and you want to see them succeed.
Bring your personality in your content. Invoke your feelings. Be opinionated. And don’t forget to react to events. It’s human to do all this, and that’s what will keep them coming back.
Human beings are emotional. Emotions offer the best route for them to connect with you.
Think of the person you want to write to, and assume that you’re speaking to that person directly as you write your content.
This way, you can get down to real business. You want your reader to understand what you’re saying. Which is why I advice bloggers to dictate their content. Nothing gets more real than that.
Lastly, use language that supports your personality, whether it’s funny, friendly, somber, optimistic, or opinionated. That’s how to stand in the middle of a sitting crowd.
Wrapping it up.
When creating or writing a blog post structure, having these four factors in mind, helps you build an article structure that fulfills each of the needs of your readers.
To cater for the diminished focus of your readers, create content that is easily digestible.
To keep your readers hooked to your, include interesting and engaging bits in your content.
To write valuable content, have a system that helps you to collect the most important information and transform it with your own words and ideas into something that your readers will love to read about.
To include a personal touch, design a blog post structure that lets you be super real and connect with your readers.
Once the structure is ready, put it to the test, analyse its performance and never stop improving it until you have something that brings in the results consistently. And this means highly engaged readers and very low bounce rates.
This could take weeks or months, but who cares as long you’re ready to build systems that work.
Is there any factor I’ve left out? If so, leave me a comment.