How to write a blog..
How to Write a Blog Post: A Step-by-Step Guide [+ Free Blog Post Templates]
Review a step-by-step guide plus useful templates to learn how to write an effective blog post for your target audience and customers.
Written by: Rachel Leist
Computer showing marketers how to write a blog post step by step to start a successful blog website
Updated: 01/31/24
Published: 01/31/24
If you’ve ever read a blog post, you’ve consumed content from a thought leader that is an expert in their industry. Chances are if the blog post was written effectively, you came away with helpful knowledge and a positive opinion about the writer or brand that produced the content.
→ Download Now: 6 Free Blog Post Templates
Anyone can connect with their audience through blogging and enjoy the myriad benefits that blogging provides: organic traffic from search engines, promotional content for social media, and recognition from a new audience you haven’t tapped into yet.
If you’ve heard about blogging but are a beginner and don’t know where to start, the time for excuses is over. Not only can you create an SEO-friendly blog, but I’ll cover how to write and manage your business's blog as well as provide helpful templates to simplify your blogging efforts.
Chapters
prevnext
What is a blog post?
How to Start a Blog
Writing Your First Blog Post
What makes a good blog post?
Blog Post Examples
How to Write a Blog Post
Let's get started with an important question.
Blogging may mean different things depending on your niche — so let’s begin with this definition.
What is a blog post?
A blog post is any article, news piece, or guide that's published in the blog section of a website. A blog post typically covers a specific topic or query, is educational in nature, ranges from 600 to 2,000+ words, and contains other media types such as images, videos, infographics, and interactive charts.
Blog posts allow you and your business to publish insights, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you boost brand awareness, credibility, conversions, and revenue. Most importantly, they can help you drive traffic to your website.
But in order to begin making posts for a blog — you have to learn how to start one, first. Let’s dive in.
How to Start a Blog
Understand your audience.
Check out your competition.
Determine what topics you'll cover.
Identify your unique angle.
Name your blog.
Create your blog domain.
Choose a CMS and set up your blog.
Customize the look of your blog.
Write your first blog post.
1. Understand your audience.
Before you start writing your blog post, make sure you have a clear understanding of your target audience. To do so, take the following steps.
Ask yourself exploratory questions.
To discover your audience, ask questions like: Who are they? Are they like me, or do I know someone like them? What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them?
Jot down your notes in a notepad or a document. This is the time to brainstorm audience attributes from scratch, no matter how out of left field they may feel. You should also think about your audience's age, background, goals, and challenges at this stage.
6 Free Blog Post Templates
Save time creating blog posts with these free templates.
Get Your Free Templates
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Carry out market research.
Doing market research sounds like a big task, but in truth, it can be as simple as accessing a social media platform and browsing user and blog profiles that match with your potential audience.
Use market research tools to begin uncovering more specific information about your audience — or to confirm a hunch or a piece of information you already knew. For instance, if you wanted to create a blog about work-from-home hacks, you can make the reasonable assumption that your audience will be mostly Gen Zers and Millennials. But it’s important to confirm this information through research.
Create formal buyer personas.
Once you’ve brainstormed and carried out market research, it’s time to create formal buyer personas. It’s important because what you know about your buyer personas and their interests will inform the brainstorming process for blog posts.
"Buyer personas aren’t just for direct marketing. They can be a handy way to keep a human in mind while you’re writing. If you’ve got other marketing or sales teams handy, coordinate your personas," says Curtis del Principe, user acquisition manager at HubSpot. "Chances are that your existing customers are exactly the kind of people you want to attract with your writing in the first place. Your sales and service teams can also have great insight into these people’s needs and pain points."
For instance, if your readers are Millennials looking to start a business, you probably don't need to provide them with information about getting started on social media — most of them already have that down.
You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their social media approach (for example — from what may be a casual, personal approach to a more business-savvy, networking-focused approach). That kind of tweak is what helps you publish content about the topics your audience really wants and needs.
Don't have buyer personas in place for your business? Here are a few resources to help you get started:
Create Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Template]
Guide: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
[Free Tool] Make My Persona: Buyer Persona Generator
2. Check out your competition.
What better way to draw inspiration than to look at your well-established competition?
It’s worth taking a look at popular, highly reviewed blogs because their strategy and execution is what got them to grow in credibility. The purpose of doing this isn’t to copy these elements, but to gain better insight into what readers appreciate in a quality blog.
When you find a competitor’s blog, take the following steps:
Determine whether they’re actually a direct competitor.
A blog’s audience, niche, and specific slant determine whether they're actually your competitor. But the most important of these is their audience. If they serve a completely different public than you, then they’re likely not a competitor. That is why it’s important to define your buyer personas before taking other steps in the blog creation process.
Look at the blog’s branding, color palette, and theme.
Once you determine that they’re your competitor, it’s time to take note of their techniques so that you can capture a similar readership. Colors and themes play a huge role in whether you seem like part of a niche — for instance, a blog about eco-friendly products should likely use earthy tones instead of bright, unnatural colors such as neon yellow or pink.
Analyze the tone and writing style of the competition.
Take note of your competition’s copywriting. Is it something you feel like you can successfully emulate? Does it ring true to the type of blog you’d like to create? What do readers most respond to? For most, creating a tech blog might be an excellent idea, but if journalistic, review-based writing doesn’t work for you, then that might not be a good fit. Be aware of what you can feasibly execute or hire freelance writers.
3. Determine what topics you’ll cover.
Before you write anything, pick a topic you’d like to write about. The topic can be pretty general to start as you find your desired niche in blogging.
Here are some ways to choose topics to cover.
Find out which topics your competitors often cover.
One easy way to choose topics for your blog is to simply learn what other blogs are writing about. After you determine your competitors, go through their archive and category pages, and try to find out which topics they most often publish content about. From there, you can create a tentative list to explore further. You might find, for instance, that a competitor only covers surface-level information about a subject. In your blog, you can dive more deeply and offer more value to readers.
Choose topics you understand well.
No matter what type of blog you start, you want to ensure you know the topic well enough to write authoritatively about it. Rather than choosing a topic you’ll need to research as you write, think about those that come most naturally to you. What has your professional experience been like so far? What are your hobbies? What did you study in college? These can all give rise to potential topics you can cover in depth.
Ensure the topics are relevant to your readership.
You may find that you hold deep expertise in various topics, but how relevant are they to the audience you understood back in step one?
Del Principe suggests checking in with sales and service teams as well. "What kinds of things do they wish customers already knew? What kinds of questions do they get asked a thousand times? What kind of objections come up from potential customers, and how do they address them?"
If you’re not serving their needs, then you’d be shouting into a void — or, worse, attracting the wrong readership. For that reason, after identifying the topics you can feasibly write about, ask yourself whether those are subjects your audience would like to explore.
Do preliminary keyword research.
Keyword research is the process of searching for topics using a keyword research tool, then determining whether there is demand by looking at each topic’s (or keyword’s) search volume. If you found the perfect topics that are the perfect cross between your expertise and your reader’s needs, you’ve struck gold — but the gold will have no value unless people are searching for those terms. Only then can you capture the audience that is waiting out there.
6 Free Blog Post Templates
Save time creating blog posts with these free templates.
Get Your Free Templates
Learn more
4. Identify your unique angle.
What perspective do you bring that makes you stand out from the crowd? This is key to determining the trajectory of your blog’s future, and there are many avenues to choose in the process.
Here’s how you can find your unique selling proposition in crowded blogging niches:
Write a professional and personal bio.
Knowing your own history and experience is essential to determine your unique slant. To get started, write a professional bio that explains, at length, who you are and which experiences most inform your blogging efforts. While I could write a lengthy exposition about my childhood, that history isn’t essential unless I’m launching a blog about raising children.
What unique experience makes you a trusted expert or thought leader on the topic? You can use your answers to that question to find your angle. Use this information to populate your “About me” page on your blog and share more about yourself.
Determine the special problem you will solve for readers.
Your readers won’t trust you or return to you unless you actively help them solve a problem. As you try to find your angle, think about ways you can help your audience surmount challenges typically associated with the topics you’ve chosen for your blog. For instance, if you’re creating a blog about sustainability, then you might help readers learn how they can compost organic materials in their home.
Choose an editorial approach.
Will you share your opinions on trending debates? Teach your readers how to do something? Compare or share original research? The editorial approach you choose will in part be informed by the topics you cover on your blog and the problems you’re helping your readers solve. If your blog is about marketing trends and your goal is to keep marketers up-to-date on the latest changes, then your editorial approach should be journalistic in nature. This is only one example of how to choose a technique.
5. Name your blog.
This is your opportunity to get creative and make a name that gives readers an idea of what to expect from your blog. Some tips on how to choose your blog name include:
Keep your blog name easy to say and spell.
No need to get complicated at all with your name, though it might be tempting, since there are so many blogs out there. While choosing a unique name is essential, it’s also important to choose one that is easy to memorize for readers. It should also be simple to remember as an URL (which will come into play in the next step).
Link your blog name to your brand message.
The more related your blog’s name is to the topics you cover, the better. For instance, DIY MFA is all about writers doing their own Master of Fine Arts in writing at home. The brand’s message is all about delving deep into one’s writing practice without needing a formal degree. Try to do something similar for your own blog name: Alluding to your blog’s message, value proposition, and covered topics in one sweep.
Consider what your target audience is looking for.
Your blog name should tie directly into what your readers want to achieve, learn, or solve. DIY MFA is about writers who don’t have the money for graduate school, but who still want to develop their writing skills. The HubSpot Marketing blog is — you guessed it — about marketing trends and tips.
It’s okay if your blog name feels “too straightforward.” Straightforward names accurately communicate what you’re about and effectively attract the right audience.
If you still need more assistance, try using a blog name generator. One last tip: Make sure the name you come up with isn’t already taken, as it could lessen your visibility and confuse readers looking for your content.
6. Create your blog domain.
A domain is a part of the web address nomenclature someone would use to find your website or a page of your website online.
Your blog‘s domain will look like this: www.yourblog.com. The name between the two periods is up to you, as long as this domain name doesn’t yet exist on the internet.
Want to create a subdomain for your blog? If you already own a cooking business at www.yourcompany.com, you might create a blog that looks like this: blog.yourcompany.com. In other words, your blog's subdomain will live in its own section of yourcompany.com.
Some CMS platforms offer subdomains as a free service, where your blog lives on the CMS, rather than your business's website. For example, it might look like this: yourblog.contentmanagementsystem.com. However, to create a subdomain that belongs to your company website, register the subdomain with a website host.
Most website hosting services charge very little to host an original domain — in fact, website costs can be as inexpensive as $3 per month when you commit to a 36-month term.
Pro Tip: You can connect your custom domain to free hosting with HubSpot’s free CMS or in premium editions of CMS Hub. This includes access to built-in security features and a content delivery network.
Here are five other popular web hosting services to choose from:
GoDaddy
HostGator
DreamHost
Bluehost
iPage
6 Free Blog Post Templates
Save time creating blog posts with these free templates.
Get Your Free Templates
Learn more
7. Choose a CMS and set up your blog.
A CMS (content management system) is a software application that allows users to build and maintain a website without having to code it from scratch. CMS platforms can manage domains (where you create your website) and subdomains (where you create a webpage that connects to an existing website).
HubSpot customers host web content via CMS Hub. Another popular option is a self-hosted WordPress website on a hosting site such as WP Engine. Whether you create a domain or a subdomain to start your blog, you'll need to choose a web hosting service after you pick a CMS.
Pro Tip: You can get started for free with HubSpot’s free blog maker. Our free CMS offers everything you need to get started– including hosting, a visual editor, and hundreds of free and paid themes to choose from.
Screenshot 2024-01-22 at 3.10.53 PM
Start using HubSpot's Free Blog Making tool to publish blog posts.
8. Customize the look of your blog.
Once you have your domain name set up, customize the appearance of your blog to reflect the theme of the content you plan on creating and your brand.
For example, if you're writing about sustainability and the environment, green might be a color to keep in mind while designing your blog.
we are wildness blog appearance
Image Source
If you already manage a website and are writing the first post for that existing website, ensure the article is consistent with the website in appearance and subject matter. Two ways to do this are including your:
Logo: This can be your business‘s name and logo — it will remind blog readers of who’s publishing the content. (How heavily you want to brand your blog, however, is up to you.)
“About” Page: You might already have an “About” blurb describing yourself or your business. Your blog‘s "About" section is an extension of this higher-level statement. Think of it as your blog’s mission statement, which serves to support your company's goals.
9. Write your first blog post.
Once you have your blog set up, the only thing missing is the content. While the design and layout are fun and functionally necessary, it's the content that will draw your readers in and keep them coming back. So how do you actually go about writing one of these engaging and informational pieces?
Writing Your First Blog Post
You’ve got the technical and practical tidbits down — now it’s time to write your very first blog post. And nope, this isn’t the space to introduce yourself and your new blog (i.e. “Welcome to my blog! This is the topic I’ll be covering. Here are my social media handles. Will you please follow?”).
Start with “low-hanging fruit,” writing about a highly specific topic that serves a small segment of your target audience.
That seems unintuitive, right? If more people are searching for a term or a topic, that should mean more readers for you.
But that’s not true. If you choose a general and highly searched topic that’s been covered by major competitors or more established brands, it’s unlikely that your post will rank on the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs). Give your newly born blog a chance by choosing a topic that few bloggers have written about.
If you need help, you can also use AI to help you create a blog post quickly.
1. Choose a topic you’re passionate and knowledgeable about.
Before you write anything, pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start. For example, if you're a company that sells a CRM for small-to-enterprise businesses, your post might be about the importance of using a single software to keep your marketing, sales, and service teams aligned.
Pro tip: You may not want to jump into a “how-to” article for your first blog post.
Why?
Your credibility hasn’t been established yet. Before teaching others how to do something, you’ll first want to show that you’re a leader in your field and an authoritative source.
For instance, if you‘re a plumber writing your first post, you won’t yet write a post titled “How to Replace the Piping System in your Bathroom.” First, you’d write about modern faucet setups, or tell a particular success story you had rescuing a faucet before it flooded a customer's house.
Here are four other types of blog posts you could start with:
List (“Listicle”): 5 ways to fix a leaky faucet
Curated Collection: 10 faucet and sink brands to consider today
SlideShare Presentation: 5 types of faucets to replace your old one (with pictures)
News Piece: New study shows X% of people don't replace their faucet frequently enough
If you're having trouble coming up with topic ideas, a good topic brainstorming session should help. In the post I’ve linked, my colleague walks you through a helpful process for turning one idea into many. Similar to the “leaky faucet” examples above, you would “iterate off old topics to come up with unique and compelling new topics.”
This can be done by:
Changing the topic scop
