Do you struggle to stay on topic when writing a blog post? Maybe you’ve just started writing blog posts or your honing your writing skills. The best way we’ve found to improve our blog posts and our writing is to start with a great blog post outline. The outline will make the difference for great written content on your blog and well structured posts.
Writing posts which attract readers and keep them engaged in your writing and content requires organized and on topic content. If you want search engines to rank your content higher as well then on topic content which answers users queries is the minimum. Having lots of takeaways for information in your post is a great way to rank for multiple keywords in search engines.
A blog post outline will help keep your content concise and on topic when writing and also helps to keep your thoughts organized. In this post we will go over step by step how to write a great outline and then we’ll provide some blog post outline examples.
1. Nail a working title
The first thing you want to do when writing a blog post is to decide on a working title. Deciding on a working title helps in writing a great outline in a few ways. The first way this helps is to gain a good understanding about what this blog post will be about. This isn’t a stage to really narrow down the idea but it is the stage to know at a high level what information the post will include. The second way this helps is to focus your thoughts on the overarching theme that the title entails.
2. Write down takeaways
The second thing you want to do when developing a blog post outline is to write down as many distinct takeaways as you can think of that your blog post will have. This is a brain dump. Write all the things you want your readers to know by the end of your article. This isn’t sections of your posts yet.
This a great way to improve seo as well. Google and your visitors are looking for answers to specific questions or queries. By writing down all the tidbits of knowledge your readers will gain by the end of the article you will automatically have answered many more questions people will be asking google.
If the working title you chose in the last step was “How to use direct messages to generate leads on LinkedIn.” Then you’d want the readers to know.
- what to include in a cold outreach message
- Who to target on LinkedIn
- What does the average back and forth look like
- Differences in messages depending on persons title or experience level
- How to close a deal
- Should you schedule a meeting
3. Break up and organize those takeaways into larger sections
The next thing you want to do is to group your takeaways you write down in the last step to larger sections of content in your post. This is the time to think a little higher level and use your logical thinking hat.
A great way to do this is with multiple passes. Look at your first takeaway and thing of a category it could go in. Then find other takeaways that fit into this category. Repeat this until you’ve put all your takeaways into categories.
During this process you may notice some categories only have one item but need more information and you can add items. You may also notice that you are lacking a few categories that should be included. Go ahead and add anything that’s lacking at this stage.
For our LinkedIn leads example this might look like. How to structure your messages
- what to include in a cold outreach message
Targeting
- Who to target on LinkedIn
- Differences in messages depending on persons title or experience level
Closing
- How to close a deal
- Should you schedule a meeting
4. Add more takeaways
At this stage you’ll probably have a pretty odd looking outline. Some sections will have tons of takeaways while other have little to none.
You should go through your sections that you completed in the last step and add any new takeaways you can think of. Every sections should have at least one and really a few takeaways.
This is the stage to fill in any gaps missing from your earlier brainstorming. Thinking of missing information can be hard sometimes but is a great skill to develop as a writer.
This is also a great time to add some juice to your intro section as well. Every blog post needs and intro section. At the very least the into sections should provide an overview of what’s included in the post.
In the step you are essentially redoing and refining what you did in the second step.
5. Revise
At this stage you should start revising. You should revise, remove, and reorganize the details in each section. As any good writer will tell you revising is an essential step in writing, this is no different when writing a blog post outline. Revision helps bring polish to your outline at this stage.
You can start by just rereading what you have thus far and working from there. By rereading you will probably notice some issues immediately pop out at you. Fix any issues you can notice as you notice them. Issues might be that a detail in one section needs to be moved to another section. Or another issue may be that a detail in one sections needs removed as it’s off topic of the blog post. You may even notice a missing details in one or two sections of your outline. You should fix all the issues you can find and then move on to the next step.
With these things in mind we may end up with an outline looking like the below example.
Intro How to structure your messages
- what to include in a cold outreach message
Targeting
- Who to target on LinkedIn
- Differences in messages depending on persons title or experience level
Closing
- How to close a deal
- Should you schedule a meeting
Examples Conclusion
6. Include links
At this point you should start adding links to data or examples that you will include in your blog post. This can just be some rough research you have or even the final sources you will use. Doing this is important to make the process of writing much quicker and easier. You should at this stage find sources for all your arguments that you plan to make in your blog post.
7. Don’t forget any details
At this point you are just about done and should really have what looks like a finished outline. You should now just try to write anything down that you don’t want to forget. This may include details that aren’t immediately relevant to your outline but become relevant once you begin writing the post. This could be details on where to find more research or images. This could also be anything you may want to include at the writing stage like a pun you thought of for the intro or another section or a particular sentence you already know how you want written.
At this stage you should have something like the final blog post outline example below.
Intro How to structure your messages
- what to include in a cold outreach message
Targeting
- Who to target on LinkedIn
- Differences in messages depending on persons title or experience level
Closing
- How to close a deal
- Should you schedule a meeting
- Example.com/closing-deals-blog-post-already-published
Examples Conclusion
Conclusion
It is great to always start with a blog post online when you begin writing a new blog post. The downside is this takes a bit of time, but does speed up the writing process later on. To save time on blog post outlines you should try GlideSEM template for blog post outline. Just input a the blog post title and our blog post outline generator will write your outline for you.