It can be intimidating to stare at a blank page when you first sit down to write. You know it’s time to produce your next blog post for your website because a consistent writing schedule is important. We also talked about Five Simple Steps to writing your next post a few weeks ago. Now that you have a standard process for your writing it will become easier to stay on your schedule. Starting with a template will help jump start your writing it is just one more step in creating your system that will make your writing efficient.
Blogging is an evolutionary process
Your posts will develop and adapt as you do more writing. Most blogs used to create short posts that were quick to read. They were often around 500 words in length. Now some of the most successful bloggers are seeing better engagement from their audience by creating more detailed longer posts. You need to know your audience first before you can determine what length and style will work best for your blog. If you don’t know the answer you can ask your readers through a survey or just try different post lengths and styles and pay attention to which ones get the best engagement.
A template creates structure
Most of your posts should have a consistent structure and form. Your readers need to know what to expect from you and they want to feel familiar with your blog. Creating a consistent style and structure will create familiarity with you. This familiarity will draw your readers back to your site for more information and lead them to read your next feature. The best way to create structure and build a welcome and familiar landing place on your site is to use a template for your posts.
What should your template look like?
Finding the right recipe for the structure of your blog will depend on your specific audience. A CPA firm writes for the benefit of their clients. Your clients are not like you, they are not anything like accountants, in fact, they are must likely the opposite of us. They don’t want a lot of detail, and they need to make a quick assessment about your blog. Your blog post must be structured to help them determine if they have time to read and if they should make time. They need to quickly answer these questions:
- Does this topic impact what I am doing now?
- Should I learn more because this topic will impact me in the future?
- Is this topic important for me to know more about?
Your template should be designed to help you easily write your blog. You can do this by breaking it into sections. This allows your readers to get a high-level overview of the post right away. They will only spend a few seconds determining if they will stay or go. If they can make this decision quickly they will read or even share your post with their audience. Your post can be easy to scan by adding headings to your sections and breaking information into bulleted lists.
Writing made simple
So what do you do next? If you don’t have a template now then take the time to look at your top posts. What common characteristics do they share? If the structure is not one of the characteristics they share then look to see which post looks most visually appealing. Now adopt that structure as your template and keep track to see what impact this change has on your readers engagement. Next build the template that you can use to start every post and you will get off to an easy start with your writing. Don’t be afraid to update or modify your template as your writing evolves. If you would like to know more Follow @TheSimpleCPA
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