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The Content Writing Guide: How to Write Blog Posts That Readers Care About

Ryan Law

Writing well is a superpower.

Great writers are great thinkers, capable of using the written word to impose structure on nebulous ideas and simplify the complex. They’re persuasive, able to create ironclad arguments to defend their beliefs. They’re interesting, masters in the art of winning attention. They can reach across oceans and continents to create real, personal connections with their readers.

Most important of all, great writing can be taught.

The following article details the nuts-and-bolts process we follow to consistently publish high-quality content marketing. It documents the guiding beliefs that separate good content from great content, and it contains more than a few practical takeaways that every writer can use to quickly improve their work.

This is our answer to the single question that our team has devoted centuries of cumulative time to answering: How do you write a blog post?

How to Write a Blog Post (That Readers Care About)

How to Find Ideas

Great writing can’t cover for bad ideas. The best content writers spend as much time honing their ideas as they do the nuts-and-bolts of their writing skills and writing style, and at Animalz, there’s a process we use to help workshop and strengthen ideas: the Idea Farm. Writers collect the “seeds” of ideas, spend time nurturing them, and write them only once they’ve grown to a mature state.

Collect the Seeds of Good Ideas

Many writers use keyword research as their default starting point, but this has limitations. Not all great ideas have a convenient 500-monthly search keyword associated with them. Many great ideas have been weakened by forcing the unnecessary constraint of keyword targeting upon them. There are many types of content, and not every article needs to be SEO content.

As well as keywords, the seeds of great ideas can be found through:

Nurture Them to Fruition

Not every idea is great from the outset. Sometimes they need time to sit in the backwaters of your consciousness. Other times they need more data or a different framing to be the best they can be. You can encourage this process by:

Deep dive: How to Make People Care About Your Content: Find the Right Angle

Harvest Ideas When They’re Ripe

It can be helpful to identify the characteristics that mean a blog post idea is ready to write. There are four factors you can consider when vetting ideas:

Deep dive: The Idea Farm: How to Sow, Grow, and Harvest Great Blog Post Ideas

How to Interview Someone for an Article

Anyone can write a blog post by opening up a page of search engine results, reading half a dozen articles, and publishing their own mishmash interpretation of the topic—no expertise, experience, or real research required.

But even if these articles manage to rank for their target keyword (no sure thing in today’s ultra-competitive search environment), they’ll never manage to achieve the one thing that really matters: convincing the reader that real experts wrote them.

Interviews with industry experts (often called subject matter experts, or SMEs) are the fastest way to write credible, authoritative content. We run interviews with SMEs all the time to add new insights into content and make blogging easier. While the process is simple—ask questions that help you write your article—we’ve picked up a few tips for getting the most from every interview.

Deep dive: How to Interview Someone for an Article

How to Outline

Outlines form the backbone of our writing process. We think of them as roadmaps: a written plan that ensures our reader reaches their destination by the end of each article while hitting each key point on the way.

We’ve built our outlining process around three key stages:


Deep dive: How to Write a Blog Post Outline

To help gauge when an outline is “finished,” we use a framework borrowed from McKinsey: mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, or MECE for short. Great articles cover their subject matter in enough detail to avoid missing ideas (collectively exhaustive) while managing to avoid repetition or straying into unrelated areas (mutually exclusive).

Deep dive: MECE: How to Think, Write & Persuade Like a McKinsey Consultant

How to Write an Introduction Hook

The introduction performs the real heavy-lifting of any article. It has to vie for attention with a thousand competing distractions and hook the reader’s interest. It has to clearly and concisely introduce the topic at hand and build the reader’s confidence that the article really gets their problem. It has to offer enough value to persuade the reader to stick around—all within a paragraph or two.

Faced with these constraints, great writers usually stick to a handful of familiar principles:

Many professional writers work on the assumption that it’s good to “tease” the reader in the introduction. They hint at the value on offer and try to lure the reader deep into the article to earn their payoff. But when dozens of other articles vie for that reader’s attention, the more likely outcome is a quick tap of the back button.

Deep dive: Hook, Line, Sinker: How to Write an Introduction

How to Write Persuasively

Persuasion is the core purpose of any article. The writer’s job is to convince the reader that the idea they’re presenting—be it a product, process, story, or opinion—is credible (ideally so credible that they take action on it). But few articles are written with persuasion in mind. Instead, they dump their ideas onto the page and hope that the reader will connect the dots (spoiler: They won’t).

To solve this problem and create consistently persuasive content, we use an ancient philosophical framework called thesis, antithesis, synthesis:

Deep dive: Persuasive Writing In Three Steps: Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis can be thought of as a type of persuasive argument called “best objection”: You’re attempting to articulate the reader’s strongest possible objection and systematically refuting it. But there are other types of persuasive argument, and the best writing uses multiple “strands” of evidence in conjunction:

Successful content will use one of these methods of persuasion. Great writing will use multiple “threads” of evidence and weave them together into an irresistible argument.

Deep dive: Persuade Like a Lawyer: How to Write to Convince a Jury of Readers

How to Write With Authority

You’ve probably had the experience of reading an article that comes within a hair’s breadth of credibility but falls just short. It’s technically accurate. Parts of it might be helpful. It’s almost a convincing, authoritative read—but it fails the final sniff test. It feels like marketing.

These near-miss articles fail because they lack the subtle hallmarks of experience that give their authors credibility. There’s a name for these hallmarks of experience: shibboleths, the small quirks and turns of phrase that prove that the writer knows their subject matter inside out.

For example, idiosyncratic language is used correctly (an article written for developers uses the common shorthand “JS” instead of the technically accurate but never actually used “JavaScript”); basic concepts aren’t treated as revolutionary (what might be an epiphany for you, the writer, is nothing new to the inveterate practitioner); stories and examples sound convincingly like a day in the life of the reader.


These shibboleths can’t be understood from reading the top-ranking blog posts—they can only come from walking a mile in the shoes of your target audience. Thankfully, there are a few ways to do just that:

Deep dive: Why Readers Can Smell Fakes a Mile Away

How to Write a Conclusion

There’s a psychological concept called the peak-end rule. It suggests that our experience of an event is disproportionately shaped by the peak—the most intense part of the experience—and the end. For writers, that means that a reader’s perception of an article is shaped in large part by the conclusion.

Many blogging guides suggest using the conclusion as a place to recap an article’s key points, but with the peak-end rule in mind, that’s a problematic suggestion. A rote summary of the article the reader just read is forgettable, and—if you’ve properly applied the BLUF principle (explored in the next section)—not necessary. A boring conclusion creates the perception of a boring article.

Instead, the conclusion is a place to deliver extra value, to leave a lasting impression, and most important of all, to inspire the reader. There are several frameworks you can use to do just that:

How to Make Your Article Skimmable

No matter how beautifully written your blog post, the chances are high that your readers won’t read it from end to end. When we analyzed 150 million page views of data in our content marketing benchmark report, we found that the median time on page is 3 minutes and 15 seconds—about as long as it takes an average reader to read 400 words.

But if you embrace the need for “skimmable” content, you can make sure that readers get a huge amount of value from your article—whether they read a thousand words or just a hundred. Here’s the simple toolkit we use to make web content as “skimmable” as possible:

1. Break up your text

Huge walls of unbroken text cause most readers’ eyes to glaze over. If you have more than three or four paragraphs of text without some sort of visual break, use one (or more) of the following devices to break it out into visually manageable chunks:

2. BLUF it

Make it easy for readers to jump to precisely the information they need:

At Animalz, we use a principle called BLUF to add immediate value to everything we write: Bottom Line Up Front. Introductions and paragraphs open with the most important details first: the key takeaways, the important data, the story’s punchline. The reader gets value, and they read on for additional context—not because of a cheap bait-and-switch.

Deep dive: BLUF: The Military Standard That Can Make Your Writing More Powerful

3. Add images and visual storytelling elements

Images are a great way to break up text and, in some instances, information is simply best communicated in a visual format—like workflows or screenshots. Add in the fact that just over a fifth of SEO traffic (22.6%) originates in Google Images, and creating original, relevant, and eye-catching graphics can increase your organic traffic significantly.

How to Choose a Great Title

Great articles can still be undone by weak titles. Like the book that’s judged by its cover (c’mon, we all do it), article titles play a disproportionate role in determining whether your article earns a “click” from curious readers.

Sometimes great titles emerge fully formed right from the outset of the content creation process. But, more usually, they require dozens of iterations to workshop and gradually refine. For that reason, we often ask our content writers to brainstorm as many blog post titles as possible. Usually, this results in five or six so-so and extremely similar titles, all variations on a theme.

It can be helpful to play with a few different guiding principles to help writers bust out of their rut:

Deep dive: 5 Ways to Write Better Blog Post Titles

Writing That Gets Read

There are billions of pages of information on the internet, and each page was written to be read. But the hard truth is that most of these webpages will never see human eyes. Of the tiny fraction that does, most will never leave a mark. Despite setting out to teach, inspire, or educate, most articles end up glossed over, overlooked, and forgotten.

So what sets great articles apart? The answer is simple but not easy: great writing.

They’re built on brilliant ideas. They incorporate expert perspectives. They pique interest with catchy hooks and pithy introductions. They’re comprehensive and logically structured, persuasive, and authoritative. They deliver value, even for the quickest skim reader. They inspire the reader to actually use their newfound knowledge, and they lead with clear benefits right up front, in the title.

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