How to Write a Blog Post - 5 Essential tips

If you are new to writing blog posts, you would find our tips on how to write a blog post very useful. You might be a seasoned writer but it's a different ball game when writing blog posts. Like with many writings, it is important to keep your audience in mind. If you want to write a blog post, then consider following our simple tips.

Below are 5 essential tips on how to write a blog post:

1. Provide an introductory guide for your blog post

Write an introductory paragraph and let the purpose of the post be clear in the introductory paragraph. Also, avoid jumping into unfamiliar concepts as it could put the readers off. If you are using an unfamiliar concept, take time to define or explain it.

Furthermore, If you mention a particular word or concept frequently in your blog post, try to include it in your title. This would enable readers to understand the theme of your post without getting confused. You could also use subheadings to introduce concepts. This would improve the readability of your post and make it easy to navigate.

2. Don't write a blog post that looks like a journal

Learning how to write a blog post is not rocket science. Keep it simple. Usually, when people search for information on the internet, their search would produce different results depending on the search query. For instance, a search for ‘how to take out a sim card from a phone’ would likely produce blog posts.

Whereas a search for ‘the system of governance in Nigeria’ would likely produce journal articles. It is thus necessary to keep your audience in mind when writing a blog post.

A blog post that looks like a journal might be difficult to read for some readers and it would put them off. Readability is very important in blog posts. When you write a blog post, try to explain things very clearly, using simple words if possible. Big words should be reserved for academic articles.

Blog posts on the other hand should be simple and easy to read. Think of it as if your audience knew nothing about the topic and they have come to you to tell them everything they need to know from scratch.

3. Try to avoid using too many quotes in blog posts

When you write a blog post, try to avoid using too many quotes. The fewer quotes you use in a blog post, the better. You should particularly avoid using quotes from other blog authors. Doing so would make it seem like you are simply copying ideas from others. We are not saying that you shouldn't attribute quotes to authors when necessary. What we are saying is that you should try to avoid borrowing ideas if possible and create original content.

Preferably, a blog post should reflect the writer's own idea or analysis. Using statistics for reference is fine for blog posts but simply quoting someone's opinion might not carry much authoritative weight in your article.

For instance one could say:

In Nigeria, the number of applicants pursuing an academic degree in music have decreased by 5 percent according to JAMB statistics.

This is a much better way of making a reference in blog posts without the need to include lengthy quotes in quotation marks. Compare this to saying:

Mary Jane said in her blog that “you do not need a University degree to be successful in the music industry. Your talent is the most important thing that you need for a successful career in the music industry. Use your talent, work hard, and connect with the right people. Once you understand this, sky is the limit”.

You can see that the first style of referencing is much neater than the latter. The latter might make your blog article seem less original. That is something you would not want. Rather you would want your blog post to reflect your own idea or analysis.

If you want to mention what another blog author has written, you might consider referring the reader to the author’s post instead. To do this you could write something like: “See Mary Jane’s post at example.com on the subject”. An author would probably appreciate this rather than you reproducing their content.

4. Use statistics in your blog post if necessary

From the example above, You can see that using statistics as references could show the reader that you have a good grasp of what you are writing about. You could thus refer to statistics where necessary. Whether you need to make a reference would usually depend on the subject of your blog post or your target audience.

5. Ask yourself why you want to write a blog post

Writing a good blog post that stands out shouldn't be difficult if you could ask yourself why you are writing. Think about the reason why you want to write a blog post in the first place. 1. Is it to share your knowledge or idea? 2. Is the purpose of your blog post to share verbatim information that is already published in another blog post? If it is the latter then there is probably no reason for you to write a blog post because people could find such information by themselves.

Never reproduce another blog author's content. Instead, you could write a blog post on the same topic from your own perspective. If you are writing to share your own knowledge or idea then there wouldn't be any need for you to borrow quotes. Also, you would not have to reproduce another author's content. For instance, we wrote these guidelines on how to write a blog post to guide writers who would like to publish their posts on Scrollforth. Even though there might be similar blog posts published elsewhere, we did not have to reproduce their contents here.

Conclusion

Follow our guidelines on how to write a blog post and you would be writing good blog posts in no time. Remember that avoiding quotes is a good practice when writing a blog post. Your blog posts would highly stand out as original content and you wouldn't have to look over your shoulders for anyone later accusing you of copyright infringement. Also if you are interested in monetizing your blog posts, see our previous post on how to make money as a freelance writer or blogger.