How to Write Your First Blog Post

And Get It Published With Thrive Architect

So you're sold on blogging?

Whether for business or pleasure, blogging can be profitable and fun.

But you're not alone in wanting to start a blog.

The years when blogging was a new and exciting thing are behind us. Now, blogging is an integral part of content marketing.

The blogging space looks a bit different today:

In the United States alone, there are over 31 million bloggers publishing content at least once a month.
Approximately 70 million blog posts are published each month by WordPress users alone
Worldwide, on every blogging platform, over 2 billion blog posts are being published each year. That's 5,760,000 blog posts published every day, and 4,000 blog posts published every minute

So. There must be no point in starting a blog today. It must be a saturated market, right?

No. Absolutely not.

Websites that have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages than websites without a blog. Indexed pages make your website far more likely to rank well on search engine results pages and have more traffic.
Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites, and links are the most important part of search engine optimization.
Business leads generated from inbound marketing and SEO close at an average rate of 14.6%, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate

In short, blogging is still an incredibly important part of any digital marketing strategy. It's essential for growing your business, driving traffic, generating leads, and closing sales.

And there's no better time to start than today.

So, how do you get started writing your first blog post?

This article will give you everything you need to know in a step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Decide what your first (and second, and third…) blog post is about

You likely already know this, but it's worth a reminder:

Blogging online is only successful if it's done on a regular basis.

That means that before you type the first word of your first blog post, you need to know the next ten, 15, or 50 posts you're going to write.

To effectively build a community through social media, a loyal base of subscribers, and return readers, you need to publish at least twice a month.

Let alone that publishing frequently results in higher traffic:

Don't take that graph as gospel, by the way.

You need to test what works for your business or objectives. Keep in mind this doesn't take into account the quality of that traffic or what they do once they get to your site (which, to be honest, are all that matters).

What to blog about?

So now that you're convinced you need to publish frequently, or at least semi-frequently, you need to plan it out.

Coming up with your blog post ideas can be one of the most exciting parts of the process!

An Actionable Walkthrough to Identifying Your First 20 Blog Posts

1
Identify 10 key terms relevant to your business or the service you're promoting. Put together a Keyword Research Strategy.
2
Get the trial of the SEO tool Ahrefs to find the search volume and competition of your target search terms.
3
Use the tool to identify related terms and queries which could become targets. Aim for high search volumes and low competiton.
4
Map out your editorial calendar, noting the competition of each search term.

Pro Tip

Get the free trial of a content optimization tool, such as Pageoptimizer Pro, or MarketMuse to determine the recommended length for your posts, and keywords of posts your articles will compete with. If you are just starting out with blogging, it’s enough to manually analyze what your immediate competitors are doing and create content that is better than theirs.

Step 2: Learn How to Format Your First Blog Post

Let’s face the sobering truth, the majority of people just skim through content on the web, and some of them only spend 15 seconds or less ‘reading’ articles.

So, before you can start writing, you need to know how to write to get people to stay on the page, and (ultimately) come back and subscribe.

Create skimmable blog posts by breaking up text into short paragraphs, including bullet point lists, headers, and subheaders to pull your reader down the page.
Include an image for every ~300 words. Articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals
If you have the ability, include video synopses of your blog content. 43% of consumers increasingly want video content from marketers.
Go long. The average word count for top-ranking Google content is between 1,140-1,285 words.

Okay, now we know how to write engaging content.

But what if you don’t know what to write? Staring at a blank screen can be frustrating. You have a topic in mind, you know what you’d like to express, but you just can’t get to writing.

There is a trick you can apply to get over this writer’s block. Use content patterns.

By applying these patterns, you give a visual guideline for your brain to organize your thoughts in a structured way. This is a repeating structure you can apply to your content to allow ideas to flow quicker onto paper.

Using the same pattern for similar blog posts will help structure your ideas and get them to flow more naturally.

Step 3: Start Writing Your First Blog Post

The Research Phase

Start with a clear benefit statement; determine what you write about and how your readers benefit from reading your article? By stating this right at the beginning, it’s easier to focus on your topic and avoid rambling.

Then, do your research: collect information about your topic with examples, screenshots, sources.

Organize your points one by one through H2 headlines as you go. You want to ensure that you have enough information to provide an in-depth analysis of your subject.

The Outline Phase

Outlining your post is one of the most crucial steps. This is the part where you take all of the information that you gathered during the research process and put it down on ‘paper’.

Make sure you have clearly defined headlines and bullet-pointed information. This is really the meat and potatoes of blogging.

If you are using a SEO tool to determine the correct placement of your keywords, this is the right time to use it. By making sure that the right keywords are present in your H2’s and H3’s in this phase (if necessary) you can avoid having to insert SEO-driven paragraphs unnaturally, after your article is done.

Once you're done, perform an outline review to double-check all of your facts and ensure that you're presenting your topic in a balanced way.

The Drafting Phase

Now it’s time to create your first draft. In this phase your task is to sit down and type out everything you want on that topic. Don’t worry about formatting yet, just grind through it. In this phase, your blog post doesn’t have to be perfect or complete yet.

It’s more important to keep writing than to get everything right.

The Second Draft

Air your brain out a little, grab another coffee, and sit down again - it’s time for the second draft.

The second draft phase is for polishing your sentences and fine-tune grammar with fresh eyes.

Make sure that the line of thought is clear throughout the article. Avoid the so-called ‘curse of knowledge’, when you expect your readers to know everything that you already know. To avoid this, explain terminology and concepts like it’s the first time you hear about them.

This is also the time for making your sentences short and concise, eliminating anything that is redundant or irrelevant.

Step 4: Edit Your First Blog Post

To make sure you've hit a home run with your first blog post, ideally you'll want an external editor to review it. But that’s not always possible, especially when you’re first starting out.

If you're publishing your first blog post by yourself, you can use a selection of powerful tools to make sure you don't leave any grammatical mistakes or typos in the article. Furthermore, these AI-powered tools also help you to match (and exceed) the quality level of your competitors'.

Tools that will help you write your first blog post's draft:

Grammarly - a spelling and plagiarism detection program that is offered as a standalone service or as a browser extension. It is seen by many to be the most effective grammar checker in the world.
MarketMuse - MarketMuse is a piece of marketing software that will help you analyze the competition for your post and optimize for specific search terms.
Clearscope - ClearScope is a service that uses real time data and natural language processing to give you recommendations on improving your content’s search growth.

Edit your first blog post with Thrive Architect

Creating visually impressive engaging content has never been easier. The Thrive Architect Visual page builder helps you to create beautifully formatted blog posts that drive traffic and shares.

Launching Thrive Architect from the WordPress dashboard is simple. Just create a new post, give it a title, save it, and launch Thrive Architect by pressing the button above the title.

We added the content block feature to the Thrive Architect editor, that saves you a lot of time when editing your first blog post. You can insert one of the pre-designed blocks to your post, then all you have to do is to fill it out with text.

In this example I added a 'setp-by-step' content block to a brand new post.

Content blocks are easy to use and they provide a flawless layout to your posts without you having to repeat the same editing steps over and over again.

Get THE BEST Page Builder for WordPress!

Get Your Copy Now!

Thrive Architect makes creating a blog post a piece of cake. But let's not stop here...

We recently launched the Thrive Theme Builder, accompanied by the Shapeshift theme. The combination of both provides a 100% visual theme building experience with no coding experience necessary, which makes it the most customizable WordPress theme today on the market.

Step 5: Publish Your First Blog Post

Your article is in draft now, looking neatly structured and well written! Now it’s time to get it published.

Image Optimization

Your images should be optimized. Google’s search bots aren’t able to determine the content of an image just by looking at it, so you have to specify what it is through the title and alt tag.

In order to keep your website fast, you need to minimize the size of the images in your article. Chances are that the screenshots you take, or (especially) the stock photos you intend to use are large, and it’s unnecessary to host image files of that size on your website.

There is a handy tool to use for reducing image sizes: Kraken.io. Upon visiting their site, click on ‘Try free web interface’ and upload your images. The tool takes care of reducing the image sizes that you’ll be able to download one by one or in a .zip file, that you can later upload into your article on your WordPress website.

Meta Description and Title

Meta descriptions and titles are essential to set up right, as they help search engines to understand the content on that page. These HTML attributes are shown whenever that page appears in the search results.

The free version of Yoast SEO plugin provides you with a straightforward interface within your WordPress editor where you can specify the SEO title and meta description of your article.

The Yoast SEO plugin in action

Set featured image

Before publishing, be sure that you’ve set a featured image for your blog. This is important, especially for social sharing, as the photo will pop up with an attached link. The ideal size of a featured image is 1200 x 628 pixels, which dimensions generally satisfy most WordPress blog themes.

Let's Start Blogging!

After completing these steps, you can publish and promote your first plogpost.

Congratulations!

Don't forget to create a killer blog homepage to present your blog posts nicely, especially if your wesbite is content-focused.

How do you plan to tackle your first blog post? Let us know in a comment below.

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