Content planning can be stressful for business owners, not to mention creating the content. Whether you're hiring a freelance writer or writing your own blog, it really helps to have an idea of what each post should be about.
You can easily lift some of the burdens of creating good content by having an outline before writing. This saves you a lot of time and work, instead of just writing freely, with no structure in mind.
Keep reading to learn how to outline blog posts to instantly improve your blog writing.
Why Blog Post Outlines Work:
Outlines are great for promoting better productivity when writing a blog post. By creating them, you can be more organized, focused, and maybe even quicker at writing your blogs.
Let's dig deeper into just how outlines can help you.
Staying Aligned With Your Goals, Strategy, and Brand
The first and most important benefit to having a blog post outline is knowing what you're going to write about and what you want out of the goal. This helps keep you or your writing team on the same page with your content goals, content strategy, and your brand’s identity.
Helps In Research Efforts
When you structure your blog posts, and note what you want to talk about in a blog, you're doing a big favour in organizing your research and finding the right information. When you search for more specific things, you'll get more targeted answers and may even learn something new.
More Efficient Content Production
Having a blog outline ready to go makes a huge difference in the time it takes to write a blog. Whether you’re writing blogs on your own or outsourcing it, writing a blog post outline can help keep everyone on track with SEO and content strategies, your brand, and any other goals you have for your content.
Better Blog Post Structure
Blog outlines help you structure your blog posts better for SEO and readability purposes. You can include the optimized heading and subheadings as well to help organize your research.
What Should A Blog Post Outline Include?
A successful blog post outline should include:
A brief that details:
The content’s goal, purpose and messaging
Recommended word count
SERP features for the keyword/search query
What part of your sales funnel (if applicable is this content supposed to target)
Target audience
Brand’s tone guide (how you want the writing to sound, brand identity info)
Sources you’ll use for your research
SERP competitors
Keywords
A Title and notes for an intro
Your main headings (h2s) and some subheads (h3)
A conclusion
How To Write A Blog Post Outline In 7 Steps
Not every blog post is going to be the same. Some will require more subheadings than the last, and others may not. It depends on your writing topic's complexity and the word count.
Readers don't want to be hit with a great wall of words.
It's better to keep your paragraphs short and your writing nicely organized with headings and subheads. For example, a 500-word blog post may not need subheads, but a 1500-word blog post will definitely need some.
Do Preliminary Research
The first thing you want to do for your blog outline is to do a bit of preliminary research on your chosen topic. You’ll need to find:
Keywords
SERP features for the target keyword/search queries (images, rich results, etc)
Top 3 SERP competitors, keywords they’re using, and notes on why you think they’re ranking so high.
Some of the sources you’ll get your actual research from
Write these notes down in a spreadsheet or doc. I do it like this:
Topic:
Keyword(s):
SERP Competitors:
Sources:
Brief The Blog Post
After noting some things from your preliminary research, you’ll want to brief your blog post, which means putting down the rest of the information you or your blog writer will need to write the best post possible.
Some of this information includes:
Blog post topic
SEO and metadata info (meta description, title tag, URL slug, etc)
Content purpose and messaging
Recommended word count
Content goals or a call to action
SERP features for the particular keyword/search query
Target audience
Brand’s tone guide (how you want the writing to sound, brand identity info)
Internal links you’d like to use
Create a Tantalizing Title
Start your purpose with a click-worthy SEO title, or title tag, which is what will be seen on the SERPs. This should be around 50 to 75 characters long and include the keyword and some power words. You might also want to create a second option for a title, also called the heading tag (h1).
Lay Out A Baseline Intro
Your intro is just three paragraphs (around 100-150 words) explaining your blog. Make sure it's not a dead giveaway but entices the reader by giving them a snippet of what they can expect from reading. For now, you can just write out what you’d like to covey with your intro. OR even just make a space for it because many intros are actually written after the rest of the blog post.
Create The Main Headings
Next, list some of your main talking points. These will be your headings, or h2 tags. Your headings should have at least one introductory paragraph that explains the heading and make a note explaining what you want to say.
Add Some Subheadings
Below every one of your talking points or headings, you'll want to add subheads that allow you to expand on or cover different things in your heading. You'll see different subheadings in this blog under every heading.
Line Up Your Conclusion or Call To Action
You may add more headings and subheadings, depending on your topic. For a complex topic, you may need to write an introductory paragraph that explains why your topic is important or introduces it in another way. For example, this blog has an introductory paragraph explaining why outlines are good.
What Does A Blog Outline Look Like?
A blog outline should look a little something like this:
Can I Use AI To Create Blog Post Outlines?
You can use AI to help outline your blog posts. There are many tools that seem very helpful with that and it’s not against any rules or regulations. However, I wouldn’t rely on AI too much.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai are great for getting topic ideas and general outlines, but it’s always best to go in and add things from your own research. Also, content written with tools like this will be flagged by Google, so I’d try to keep the use of AI to a minimum.
Personally, I do not use AI for any kind of outlining or content writing purposes. Even with the AI tools I do use, like Grammarly’s editor, it’s all my own content, and I review every suggestion because oftentimes, it’s wrong.
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