Marketing

How to write an engaging blog post outline

Post by
Sarah Lee

You're at a laptop or computer, trying to write your blog post. You're struggling because you don't have an outline and you don't know where to begin. You're overwhelmed and don't know where to start because you have a plethora of ideas and thoughts, but they are not adequately articulated yet. Writing an outline might seem silly and unnecessary to you, but it's a key step that you should take.

In order to write a good blog post that is coherent and attracts traffic it is imperative that you develop a blog post outline containing writing ideas related to the blog. This outline will be a rough sketch of your blog post. It can be in the form of a bulleted list, a mind map, or a chart. Your blog post outline should include a summary of what you will be writing about, and the main points you want to cover in your blog. Your outline should also include any supporting information you have collected for your blog post, such as images or links to other articles.


Know Your Audience

The first thing you need to think about when starting a blog is determining who your audience is. This will give you writing ideas and how often to post it. It will also help you decide what types of ads, affiliated links, and other monetization methods to use. The second thing you will need to do is determine a title for the blog post. A blog title is the first thing a reader would look at and therefore it is very important that you have a good title for your blog. The title of your blog should be catchy and make people want to read it. If the title is not good, people may never find out about your blog. You should come up with the title before you even think about what you are going to write in the blog. The title should reflect the content of the blog and should not be too long. If you want to dig deeper on how to write engaging blog titles then here's another blog post that you can check out. After the title comes the introductory paragraph. Include an introduction paragraph that introduces your blog post's topic. You will need clear topic sentences for each point of discussion. A good topic sentence is one that is concise and provides the reader with enough information to know what the post is about. It is what makes or breaks the situation. The reader usually reads the topic sentence and decides whether they want to continue reading or not. The topic sentence should contain the crux of the topic while being engaging and interactive at the same time. 


Grab The Reader’s Attention

The best way to make your post catchy is by making it short, sweet, and to the point. The more you try to say something, the more likely you are to say something wrong. It’s better for your readers to get a clear idea of what you want them to know. Brainstorm your content related to the topic sentence and only write the relevant information. Using bullets and subheadings is a technique that will make the blog outline easier to read. Bullets and subheadings are great for making an outline more visually appealing. Subheadings are also helpful because they break up the paragraphs more. It is important to use bulleted lists within the text so that you can keep things organised. Bullets also make the text concise and to the point which makes it easier for the reader to find what they were looking for.  


Give Your Blog A Structure

Another effective blogging strategy that you may want to develop in your blog outline is the use of images; adding engaging images to a website is an excellent way to make it more interactive. Images can be used for anything from banners to sidebars, and they're relatively easy to find on the internet. If you want to use an image as your main header it's advised to use one that is of high quality so that it will remain legible when shrunken down to a small size. Using images provides a break in the text making the blog more visually appealing. 

Use correct tense and grammar

The most important point perhaps is to proofread and edit your draft. The first step of proofreading is to go through your draft and make sure each sentence has a verb. Make sure you are using the correct tense. Next, use the grammar checker on Microsoft Word to catch any mistakes that you missed. Finally, read your draft out loud to find any errors that may have been overlooked. If your blog post contains grammatical errors, it will lose credibility and as a result the traffic will also be low. 

Arrive at a conclusion!

Lastly, include a conclusion paragraph that summarises the key points of your blog post. Conclusion paragraph will be the last paragraph in a blog post or essay. It should summarise the key points of the article and may also mention any additional resources that are mentioned in the text. Add links to other relevant posts after the conclusion. These links should be relevant to the blog post and should contain topics that the reader may be interested in. If any additional resources were used, their links should also be present here. 
 

To conclude, writing a properly devised outline is a beneficial step when planning to write a blog post. Follow the outline mentioned above to create an effective outline that attracts customers and readers and if you still finding it difficult to write blog post outlines or struggling with writing a great blog post then try our powerful AI copywriter which can help you create engaging blog posts in minutes. With MarketingCopy AI, you can turn a few words into engaging blog titles, outlines and more. MarketingCopy AI's long form writing assistant can write content for you using direct prompts and instructions. Sign up for a free trial today and let our AI write all the blog posts for you.