Stop procrastinating and start blogging: overcoming the tyranny of the blank page

Blogging. You know you should do it. It’s good for search engine visibility, engaging current customers, drawing in new customers. But getting started can be tricky: there’s nothing worse than staring at a blank page and not knowing how to begin. So here’s some ideas for how to crack on and write good quality blog content.

1. Know why you’re blogging

Before you start, make sure you’ve got something to say. What’s valuable about your content? Are you sharing an experience? Offering advice? Giving a professional opinion?

Don’t paralyse yourself with imposter syndrome, but just make sure that what you’re writing is genuinely useful to your audience.

2. Create a structure

If it’s a simple topic and you’re a very confident writer, you might be able to just go straight from brain to keyboard to screen in one go.

For everyone else, creating an article structure, brainstorming ideas or listing important points can help you put your thoughts in order and make sure you stay on-track.

Before you start writing you should know who you’re writing for, what they want to know, and what points you want to get across.

3. Don’t begin at the beginning

A strong introduction is essential: you need to grab the reader’s attention and make them want to continue. It’s a lot of pressure for a first sentence.

But here’s a secret: you can write the introduction last. The only thing worse than writing something awful is writing nothing at all. So if you’re finding it hard to get started, start in the middle with the fun bit, that you know everything about.

4. Write the title at the end. And then write another 5 titles.

The title is the shop window to your article. It tells passers-by what you’re offering, and makes it look attractive enough for them to pause on their journey and linger with you a little while.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good title — The Onion writers pitch headlines and then do the stories, and Upworthy.com founder Peter Koechley recommends that you spend half your time writing just the headline. Half!

I find it useful to write an imaginary tweet about my article — describing in a short amount of text what it is, and why someone should follow the link.

Be descriptive rather than cryptic, but it’s ok to add in a little intrigue too. Just don’t go down a tired clickybaity route where you promise so much more than you can deliver.

5. When you’ve finished…. it’s actually 70% finished

If you’re writing an important piece of work, you’ll probably ask other people for their advice and input. If you’re doing this, have the mindset that when you’ve finished, it’s only 70% finished.

70% finished means that you need their advice to reach 100% complete, and your ego won’t get bruised when they suggest changes.

Be very clear about what feedback you want. Are you at that 70% stage when you’re open to feedback on everything? Or have you moved beyond that, and now you’re just asking for a final check, to look for grammatical errors, typos, and broken links?

When asking for feedback, remember that the question should never be ‘do you like this?’. The question should always be ‘does this piece of work answer the original brief?’.

6. Pause. Publish. Proofread again.

It’s tempting to hit publish as soon as you’ve finished your blog post. You’re proud of it, you’re pleased it’s finished, and frankly you want to get on with other things now. But unless it’s a very time-critical post, don’t hit publish straight away.

Give yourself a little distance from what you’ve written, and when you return to it you might realise you’d forgotten an important point, or you think of a better way to express an idea.

Once you really are satisfied that it’s the best it’s going to get, go ahead and publish. But it doesn’t end there! As soon as it’s live, check it again. In particular, check the formatting and links. You’ve put all this effort in, you don’t want to be sabotaged by something as silly as bad paragraph spacing!

Job done? Not quite… the final step is to promote your blog post to get as many readers to it as possible. But that’s a story for another day.