All You Need to Know About Writing a Blog Post

GUIDE WITH TEMPLATES

 

Today, people and organizations of all walks of life manage blogs to share analyses, instruction, criticisms, and other observations of an industry in which they are an ‘expert’. As mental health professionals, a blog is an important part of establishing trust and credibility with our colleagues, our clients and our community. And, because we have a collaborative approach to mental health care, our blog is an ideal place to bring this collaboration to life with every one at everwell contributing their expertise. The following is a guide with a simple blog post formula to follow, along with templates for creating six different types of blog posts:

  1. The How-To Post

  2. The List-Based Post

  3. The What-Is Post

  4. The Pillar Page Post

  5. The Newsjacking Post

  6. The Infographic Post

As long as you truly know the subject matter your writing about - and since you're an expert in your field - there's no reason you can't write an excellent blog post.

Why are blog posts so important?

A blog increases our ability to grow everwell, communicate with our clients, reach potential clients, and contribute to the community in our roles as mental health professionals. A blog enhances our ability to be ‘found’ on Google through keywords and phrases (aka SEO or Search Engine Optimization). Through Google and SEO, readers are able to find our website. Once on our website, the quality of our blog posts gives us the opportunity to reach people in different ways including the potential to turn readers into clients.

What makes a good blog post?

Before you write a blog post, you should understand what makes a good post. You should know the answers to questions like "Why would someone keep reading this entire blog post?" and "What makes the audience come back for more?"

To start, a good blog post is interesting and educational. Your blogs should answer a reader's question and help them with a problem they might have. Maybe more importantly, you have to do this in an interesting way.

It's not enough just to answer someone's questions. You have to provide actionable steps, while being entertaining. For example, your introduction should hook the reader to continue reading the post.

Then, you can use examples to keep your readers interested in what you have to say.

A good blog post is interesting to read, while also providing educational content to its audience.

For specific information and ideas regarding ‘therapy’ blogging, please refer to the following references:

  1. Therapy Tribe How to Write a Compelling Therapist Blog

  2. Counseling Today Friend, not foe: Blogging for counselors

  3. Therapy Simple Why you should start a therapy blog and how to do it

  4. Therapy Den Why therapists should blog + 100 blog ideas to get you started

 

How to Write a Blog Post

A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

 

1.Understand your audience

Before you start to write your first blog post, have a clear understanding of your target audience. What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? What is their age, gender, characteristics, values? How knowledgeable are they on this topic? What do they care about? What problem(s) are they trying to solve?

2. Identify your post topic

Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post.What is the goal of this post? Why do you feel this post would be important/interesting to your readers? The topic can be pretty general to start with. For example, if you're a plumber, you might start out thinking you want to write about leaky faucets.

Then, as you do your research, you can expand the topic to discuss how to fix a leaky faucet based on the various causes of a faucet leak.You might not want to jump right into a "how-to" article for your first blog post, though, and that's okay. Perhaps you'd like to write about modern types of faucet setups, or tell one particular success story you had rescuing a faucet before it flooded someone's house.

If a plumber's first how-to article is about how to fix a leaky faucet, for example, here are four other types of sample blog post ideas a plumber might start with:

  • List-based Post: 5 ways to fix a leaky faucet

  • Curated Collection Post: 10 faucet and sink brands you should look into today

  • SlideShare Presentation: 5 types of faucets that should replace your old one (with pictures)

  • News post: New study shows X% of people don't replace their faucet on time

If you're having trouble coming up with topic ideas a helpful process for turning one idea into many is to iterate off old topics to come up with unique and compelling topics. Similar to the "leaky faucet" examples:

  • Changing the topic scope

  • Adjusting the time frame

  • Choosing a new audience

  • Taking a positive/negative approach

  • Introducing a new format

Based on the topic you are covering, what are 3 primary things you want to communicate? What keywords and phrases do you need to include?

3. Come up with a working title

Then you might come up with a few different working titles -- in other words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing. The title should be clear and catchy, include primary keywords/phrases if possible.

For example:

Instead of Mental Health at Work, a better title would be Managing Mental Health at Work: How to Balance Your Work and Home Life or, Stressed Out at Work? 10 Tips to Manage Your Mental Health at Work or, Is Your Work Impacting Your Mental Health: What To Do When Job Stress Becomes Too Much

See that evolution from topic, to working title, to final title? Even though the working title may not end up being the final title, it still provides enough information so you can focus your blog post on something more specific than a generic, overwhelming topic

4. Write an intro

First, grab the reader's attention. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs -- or even sentences -- of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they've given your post a fair shake. You can do this in a number of ways: tell a story or a joke, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.

Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives.

5. Organize your content in an outline

Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information -- for the reader and the writer. The trick is to organize the info so readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. The organization can take multiple forms -- sections, lists, tips, whatever's most appropriate. But it must be organized! To complete this step, all you really need to do is outline your post. That way, before you start writing, you know which points you want to cover, and the best order in which to do it.

Templates:

  1. The How-To Post

  2. The List-Based Post

  3. The What-Is Post

  4. The Pillar Page Post

  5. The Newsjacking Post

  6. The Infographic Post

6. Write your blog post!

The next step -- but not the last -- is actually writing the content.

Now that you have your outline/template, you're ready to fill in the blanks. Use your outline as a guide and be sure to expand on all of your points as needed. Write about what you already know, and if necessary, do additional research to gather more information, examples, and data to back up your points, providing proper attribution when incorporating external sources. Need help finding accurate and compelling data to use in your post? Check out this roundup of sources -- from Pew Research to Google Trends.

And, if you are looking for more direction, the following have valuable writing advice:

7. Proofread/edit your post/add visuals

The editing process is an important part of blogging -- don't overlook it. Ask a grammar-conscious co-worker to copy, edit, and proofread your post, and consider enlisting the help of The Ultimate Editing Checklist (or try using a free grammar checker, like the one developed by Grammarly).

As social networks treat content with images more prominently, visuals are now more responsible than ever for the success of blog content in social media. In fact, it's been shown that content with relevant images receives 94% more views than content without relevant images. Any imagery that is included with your copy must be visually appealing and relevant to your post.

NOTE: You do NOT have to provide images. They will be created for you by our graphic designer. However, if you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to include them as a highlighted note within your body copy.

8. Tags

Tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post. They also allow readers to browse for more content in the same category on your blog. Refrain from adding a laundry list of tags to each post. Instead, put some thought into a tagging strategy. Think of tags as "topics" or "categories," and choose 10-20 tags that represent all the main topics you want to cover on your blog. Then stick to those.

NOTE: These tags should go at the end of your article and will be used in the website ‘back-end’.

9. Insert a call-to-action (CTA) at the end.

At the end of every blog post, you should have a CTA that indicates what you want the reader to do next -- subscribe to your blog, download an pdf, register for a class or event, read a related article, etc. Typically, you think about the CTA being beneficial for the marketer. Our visitors read our blog post, they click on the CTA, and eventually we generate a lead. But the CTA is also a valuable resource for the person reading our content -- use your CTAs to offer more content similar to the subject of the post they just finished reading. Readers who want to learn more have the opportunity to do so, and we receive a lead we can nurture ... who may even become a client! 

For example:

HOW WE CAN HELP YOU

Our ultimate goal at everwell is to provide you with practical strategies and tools you need to navigate and manage your specific challenges so that you are moving forward with a renewed sense of purpose and insight.

Please contact us to speak to a therapist about whether counselling is right for you.

10. Add your references.

It is important to reference credible, relevant, timely and if possible, Canadian sources. References should include the name of the source and a link to the specific information referenced.

For example:

References and Resources

  1. CAMH Spring Cleaning for Your Mental Health

  2. Swedish How decluttering can improve physical and mental health

  3. PTI Mental Health and Spring Cleaning

  4. Psychology Today Tips for Spring Cleaning

  5. Good Housekeeping How Spring Cleaning Can Help Manage Stress, According to Psychologists

  6. Forbes How to Get That Spring Clean Feeling Mentally and Emotionally This Season

11. Finalize that title

Last but not least, it's time to spruce up that working title of yours that will grab the attention of your reader.

Here's what to consider:

  1. Start with your working title.

  2. As you start to edit your title, keep in mind that it's important to keep the title accurate and clear.

  3. Then, work on making your title ‘catchy’ -- whether it's through strong language, alliteration, or another literary tactic.

  4. If you can, optimize for SEO by sneaking some keywords in there (only if it's natural, though!).

  5. Finally, see if you can shorten it at all. No one likes a long, overwhelming title -- and remember, Google prefers 65 characters or fewer before it truncates it on its search engine results pages.

12. End with the post-writing checklist

  1. Is the headline clear and catchy?

  2. Is this piece of content relevant to your target audience? Does it address at least one of their problems and provoke them to take the next step?

  3. Have you used short sentences and paragraphs and broken up the paragraphs with sub-headlines?

  4. Have you stated your main point in the first couple sentences?

  5. Are you using a lot of jargon or terms that only someone in your profession would use? The answer here should be ‘no’ here in most cases unless you are defining those terms for informational or educational purposes.

  6. Is the content conversational? Are you addressing the reader as “you”?

  7. Is it interesting? Informational? Educational? Helpful? Inspiring? It doesn’t have to be ALL these things but, it should at least be interesting and ONE other of these things.

  8. Is the piece free of typos and grammatical errors?

  9. Is there a clear call-to-action?

  10. Are there a variety of credible resources? Is at least one of them Canadian?

 
 

HOW TO SUBMIT YOUR BLOG POST

Once you have completed writing your blog post, you have two options for submission:

OPTION 1:

  • Save your file as a Word document with the title and date of your post.

  • For example: How-to-stay-calm-in-the-midst-of-COVID_April-1-2020.doc

  • Attach your file to an email and send to: drea.baptiste@gmail.com

  • Include your full name and contact information (email)

OPTION 2:

  • Write your blog post in an email

  • Send email to: drea.baptiste@gmail.com

  • Include your full name and contact information (email)