How To Create Awesome Content For Your Blog (Sharing My Process)

OK, so there's probably enough information online regarding creating content for your blog. But what the heck, I thought, why not create my own in-depth insight and tutorial guide to add to the list? The only difference is that I'm going to show you how to create AMAZING content for your blog, not just mediocre content.

I've already written a bunch of useful articles that various components of creating blog posts, such as writing powerful headlines, and the best types of posts to create, content layout, etc. I'll be sure to add some links to those posts at the end for you.

In this post, I'm going to share with your my process for creating a great blog post from complete scratch. So, whether you're just starting out with your blog or you're a seasoned blogger in need of some inspiration, I hope you'll find this post useful and valuable.

We'll also talk about the three key components required for creating great blog content, as well as marketing and promoting your blog posts.

OK, I'll assume that you're more or less new to the world of blogging and content creation, and so let's first answer the following question -

What is 'Great Content' in blogging?

Seriously, what is considered a great piece of blog content these days?

Well, first of all, every blogger wants to become successful, and as we all know, content is the most crucial component for building a successful blog.

There are plenty of bloggers out there that know how to create awesome content. That said, only a few of those bloggers manage to make their content truly compelling, the best by any standards. They know how to make their content stand out from the rest.

Now you might be thinking to yourself - With so many other channels available for creating and distributing online content, is creating blog content really worth it? Isn't blogging dead?

No, blogging is not dead and creating blog content still matters, hugely.

Here's an interesting statistic for you:

Blog posts account for around 65% of all content being created. Source.

Still think blogging's dead?

So, with that number firmly in your mind, it's time to rethink your blog content creation strategy.

What I mean to say is that your content has to be awesome, truly awesome, to make any impact. It's not impossible, you just have to put in a lot of hard work, but it will be worth it.

So, let me start by sharing with you some examples of what I consider to be the best content on the web when it comes to their respective subjects.

Traffic Generation Cafe - Content Repurposing: Getting The Most Bang For Your Content Buck!

This post over on TGC by Ana Hoffman is, in my belief, the most complete article on the topic of content repurposing. I have not found another post on the web that is so in-depth and as valuable.

Ana's post is packed with actionable tips, ideas, and strategies designed to educate you about the benefits of repurposing content in marketing. She also teaches you how to repurpose your blog content the right way.

In addition to this, Ana's post also provides valuable insights from other industry experts and bloggers on the topic of content repurposing.

All of these components helps to make TGC's article the most authoritative on the topic.

Here's another example -

Fabrizio Van Marciano - 10 Of The Best Digital Marketing Ideas To Grow Your Business In 2020

OK, so this is my own blog post over on my web design blog at Fabrizio Van Marciano Dot Com. I wrote it a good few years now, but I've been keeping it up to date.

I have tried to make it one of the most complete articles on the topic of digital marketing for newbies. I'm not trying to blow my own trumpet, of course, but I have put a lot of research, time, and energy into making this article the best I possibly could.

Room for one more? Let's try a resource post. How about this one -

Neil Patel - The Ultimate List Of Free SEO Tools

In this post, Neil Patel shares an enormous resource list of the best free SEO tools you can use to grow your website traffic. Fantastic stuff, right?

Neil doesn't just list the tools and links to them, he also describes each of the tool's key features, the benefits, and purpose, thus adding incredible value. Isn't that awesome?

OK, so hopefully you have some idea of what a great blog post should look like, however, these are just a few examples. Let's now look at what things are needed to make a blog post really 'Great'.

Let's start with these three key elements -

1. Value.
2. Information.
3. Resource.

#1. Value

Most people come to a blog with a problem, and so they're in search of a solution. They land on your blog post after doing a quick search on Google. Reading your post, their hope is to find a solution to their problem quickly.

So, here are some types of blog posts that you can create that can provide that value of solving a problem -

1. Tutorial or 'How to' posts/videos.
2. List posts.
3. Q&A posts.
4. Review and comparison posts.
5. Unboxing/review posts/videos.

Focus on reader benefits and avoid talking too much about yourself, your products or whatever it is you're promoting, or your services.

#2. Information

In addition to value, a great post should also be informative. Cornerstone articles are great for providing lots of useful information. The process is simple, you pick a subject that you want to write about, and you literally go to town on it.

Go to town? What do I mean by this?

I mean that you provide as much clear and concise information as possible. Literally include everything there is to know about the subject in one single post.

You might be asking - Is this even possible?

Yes, of course, but you have to be very specific about the subject you want to write about.

You can pick a broad subject and write everything you can about that subject in one post if you like, but that could mean you end up creating a 12K-word, content-heavy, blog post. That's not really practical for the user.

Here's an example of what you should do instead -

Example of subject title: "How To Write Clickworthy Headings For Your Email Newsletters"

As you can see from the example above, it's very specific. A broad subject would be something like "How To Do Email Marketing". You could write a post like this, but as I said, it would require a sheer amount of research and a huge volume of content for a single post.

Regardless of whether you're writing cornerstone articles or not, your posts should always be informative. The information you provide should be relevant, current, and accurate too.

#3. Resource

Every valuable and informative blog post should contain some kind of resource for the user.

For example, if you're writing a post all about creating click-worthy headings for email newsletters, you might want to include some useful links to free headline optimizer tools. Or links to external posts on a similar topic. You can even add some interesting statistics and cite the source.

Adding resources can also be seen as adding extra value to the post you are creating.

Starting From Complete Scratch (My Blog Post Creation Process)

Right then, let's begin writing our super awesome, super-valuable, informative, compelling, and resourceful blog pos from complete scratch.

Below is the process I go through myself to create awesome content for my blog:

Step One - Planning Your Post

First, go and grab a pen, paper or notebook, and your favorite beverage. I like to drink herbal teas when I'm in 'content creation' mode. I'll also have a large glass of cold water on my desk too.

Anyway, sit somewhere comfortable and begin researching and planning out your post. This is my favorite part of blog content creation.

Recommendation: You should have a list of post topic ideas you can pick a topic from. If you haven't got a list to use, start by creating one.

Once you've picked a subject you want to write about, and have done some thorough research, grab your post planner template and begin planning.

1. Write today's date.
2. Write your blog post title.
3. Add the category names where the post will be placed in.
4. Add any tags you want to use.
5. Write down your SEO keywords.
6. Write a short summary and the structure of your post.
7. Highlight the main key points of your post.
8. Make a note of any research, stats, data, cited information, and links to articles, tools you want to include in the post.
9. Add your persuasive call to action. You can do this tactfully and without coming off as a desperate used-car salesman.

The post planner template is available in my Ultimate Pro Blog Planner workbook.

Step Two - Structure Your Post

Remember that all of the preparation work you did in step one will help make the process of creating/writing your post easier and a lot more fun.

Structuring your post means including an intro paragraph, placing headings where they should be, deciding what image to use for a featured image, as well as adding other interesting visuals. Adding a closing paragraph, native links to relevant posts, outbound links, affiliate links, etc.

Of course, you won't know where everything should go until you've created a good chunk of your post content.

You will also end up chopping and changing the layout and structure of your article as you begin puzzling the pieces together, but it's useful to have a rough structure as a guide to go by.

Step Three - Create Your Post

OK, so now the real fun begins, time to get creative.

Grab your favorite beverage, along with your notes, your post planner, your post structure template, your research, and let's begin putting together your post.

Here are some tips for creating your post. As a reminder, this is me sharing with you my process and strategy -

1. Track your time. To avoid procrastinating, set yourself a timer next to your computer or laptop. The Focus Tracker app is great for doing just this. Set yourself 1-hour writing slots, and then take a 10-minute break before going back to write for another hour.
2. Remove distractions. Turn off the TV, Radio, lock the doors, close the curtains, or just go to somewhere that's quite to create your post. I would also recommend turning off your mobile phone. Mobile alerts and web notifications can be distractive, so the fewer distractions you have, the more focused you will be.
3. Write first, edit later. When writing content for your blog posts, focus just on writing. When you're done with writing, take a big break and then come back to begin editing your first draft. You will find that by focusing on just writing, you won't be wasting your creative time trying to fix things along the way. You can save all of that for the editing phase later on.
4. Keep your paragraphs short and sweet. When it comes to the written portion of your blog posts, remember not to use too many long paragraphs that could make it difficult for people to read. Keep your paragraphs around three or four lines of text in length.
5. Use a good image to text ratio. With any blog post, you should make sure you use suitable and relevant images to break up the flow. These can include screenshots and infographics.
6. Diversify your content. Include some videos, audio clips, interactive content such as polls and quizzes, and more.
7. Include some statistics. Data-driven content that includes interesting statistics, graphs, charts, can help make your blog content authoritative. Just make sure you're getting your data and stats from reliable sources, and be sure to cite them.
8. Style your post. Don't just write paragraph after paragraph of boring linear-styled content. Style your post layout to make it visually interesting and beautiful. WordPress Gutenberg allows you to get creative with your post layout, so be sure to make use of the styling blocks, bullet points, list-styles, quotes, click-to-tweets, etc.
9. Optimize for SEO. Don't overdo it, though. Mention your focus keyword and don't forget to throw in some semantic keywords too. Make your SEO content as natural as possible.

Step Four - Edit Your Post

OK, so once you are done with writing and crafting the components of your awesome post, it's time to start editing your first draft.

Editing your post can take just as much time as writing it. You will undoubtedly be adding and removing parts of your post to make it good.

Here's my process for editing blog content.

First-draft - Re-read the post out loud. Add or remove any pieces of the post to make it easy for people to scan or read. This may include shortening paragraphs further, swapping words that might sound too complicated, etc.

Second-draft - Re-read the entire post and check for spelling and grammatical errors. I try hard not to do any spell checking until I've completely written my blog posts. The reason for this, again, is so that I don't eat into my creative writing mode. Grammarly is a great tool for checking spelling and grammar.

Third-draft - For the third-draft, I re-read everything to make sure the post makes perfect sense. I might also take this opportunity to copy the entire written post and paste it into my Hemmingway Editor App. I use the Hemmingway Editor app to check the readability score of my post. I might make additional improvements before re-pasting it back into WordPress.

Of course, you don't need to do this yourself, I'm just quite nit-picky when it comes to making my articles easy to read for everyone.

Fourth-draft - Oh yes, indeed there's a fourth-draft. But this doesn't come straight away. What I like to do is leave it for a day and go back to the post the next day to re-read and make sure everything is in good order before hitting that publish button. Or scheduling the post for a later date.

Publish and promote

Right then, your post is done and dusted. It looks awesome and you should be super proud of yourself for putting the time and effort into creating it.

Now, you're either going to publish your post straight away, or you're going to schedule it. I'll let you decide.

Marketing and promoting your post is the next BIG crucial step in creating a great post. Yes, marketing is important, you can't expect for people to naturally find it themselves. And after all, you didn't spend all that time creating your wonderful post just so that no one could read it, right?

So, where do you begin with content promotion? Here are some ideas and tactics to get you started.

1. SEO

Optimizing your blog posts for the search engines is your first step in marketing your content, especially if you want to drive consistent free traffic to your posts in the future.

I want to stress, though, you don't have to be an SEO expert to rank your blog posts in Google or any other search engine. Anyone can implement the simplest SEO methods and get good results. It does get a little technical and more difficult when you're trying to rank for a much higher competitive keyword. But, we won't get into this today.

I rarely pay attention to on-page SEO when I'm writing my posts. I implement the very basic things like including a few semantic keywords, adding keywords in headings, adding alt-tags to images, etc. But, I certainly don't go crazy and stuff keywords everywhere.

I want to recommend a few good plugins for SEO for WordPress. Check out SEO by Yoast, if you're looking for something free. Also, take a look at SEOPressor Connect (Aff). This is another popular and advanced SEO plugin that I've used on many niche websites. SEOPressor is a monthly subscription-based plugin.

2. Social Media Promotion

Undoubtedly, one of the best places to promote your blog content is on social media. The success of your social media marketing will, of course, depend on the type of audience you have, and if you have one.

I strongly recommend scheduling your post on social media rather than post at any old time.

You can use a tool like Missinglettr (Aff) or CoSchedule (Aff) to schedule your social messages. CoSchedule comes with some cool social media analytic features that provide useful information regarding engagement and the best time to post.

Over time you'll be able to analyze the data and optimize your posting time for optimum engagement and even more shares.

3. Email Promotion

The best way to get the word out about your latest post is to send out an email newsletter to your subscribers.

According to or Oberlo, there were 3.9 billion email users in 2019. And this is set to grow to 4.3 billion by 2023.

Every successful blogger will have their own email list. An email list is considered the second lifeblood of a blog, after content. If you haven't started building your email list yet, then check out this detailed tutorial.

4. Video Promotion

In my experience, using video is the best way to send out a direct and personal message about your latest blog post. Video marketing is on the rise, yet so many bloggers are still not utilising this channel.

Did you know that by the year 2021, video content will account for 80% of all internet traffic? I'm sure it's something to do with the plain fact that 87% of online marketers use video content in their marketing campaigns.

So, with those stats in mind, don't be afraid to post a video on your Facebook page and your Instagram profile to talk about your latest and greatest blog post.

5. Influence Marketing

Influence marketing is a powerful form of marketing that many bloggers are implementing into their content strategy. It's been around for a good few years now, so I'm sure you've heard of it.

First, you need to get on the radar of other top bloggers and influencers in your niche. Bloggers with larger audiences than yours are your best bet.

In order to make this successful, you need to plan ahead. Make a list of all the top blogs you enjoy reading and get in front of those blog's audiences.

Comment, share, mention, link, do everything you can to get yourself noticed by your influencers. In time, those influencers will begin returning the favor and help to promote your blog content, and even mention your blog in their posts too.

There are some fantastic tools you can use to help with influence marketing and blogger outreach, these include Ninja Outreach (Aff) or BuzzStream.

More Promotion Tips

These are just a few of the things you can do to promote your blog posts. If you're new to blogging and online marketing, I would recommend you focus all of your energy on learning two or three strategies and making them really work before moving on to the next tactic.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of trying to figure out every single marketing tactic in the book. Avoid doing that if you can. For more top tips on blog marketing and promotion, check out this in-depth post.

It's a wrap

So, there you have it. A complete step-by-step process for creating amazing content for your blog. Whether you're starting your blog from scratch or you're a seasoned blogger, I hope you've found this post useful and educational. Best of luck with your blog, and I wish you all the success in the world.

Recommended Posts

OK, so as I promised at the start of this post, here are some additional links to further reading and resources that you might enjoy.

1. How To Market Your Blog To Boost Traffic And Readers.
2. How To Create A WordPress Blog With Bluehost.
3. How To Grow Your Blog With Thrive Leads And MailChimp.
4. 5 Powerful Tools For Creating Magnetic Headlines For Your Blog Posts.
5. 100 Magnetic Blog Post Headline Title Ideas For Your Next Post.
6. How To Write Product Reviews That Convert
7. How To Make Your Blog Posts More Interesting And Beautiful

Affiliate Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links to products and services I recommend and use in my blogging business. These are marked as (Aff). If you make a purchase through any of the links in this article, I will be paid a small commission, at no extra charge to you. Thanks for your continued support.