What do a great cook and a great blogger have in common? A lot more than you might think. So grab a quick snack and keep reading for an explanation you can really sink your teeth into.
Inspiration strikes in strange ways; in this case, I reached the end of Neil Patel's excellent article covering 13 questions you should ask yourself while writing a blog post. In his discussion of the last question, he compared a blog post to a restaurant meal. Will your reader complain about your blog post because you've served them skimpy fare? “Are you feeding people content so they are full when they leave your site...or are they hungry, looking for more?” Patel asked. “If they are still hungry, your readers probably won't come back.”
So if your readers are devouring your blog content, that makes you a cook. And if a blog post is a complete meal, then writing a blog post is like cooking that meal. As with a meal, your visitors enjoy the finished product, but you know how much work went into it. Creating a good blog post, like cooking a good meal, involves a process that begins even before you turn on your computer or open your cookbook to track down some recipes.
It starts with what you enjoy. No, actually, it starts with what really makes you salivate. Can't get enough spicy Indian food? Then you probably shouldn't be cooking potato pancakes – unless you want to give them a very different twist. The best chefs, like the best bloggers, are passionate about what they're doing. So write about your passion. Or at least find something in what you're writing that makes you feel passionate.
Now if you're preparing a meal for a group, you need to take their tastes into consideration. Is someone allergic to garlic? You'll need to exclude that spice and find ways to make your meal just as flavorful. That's eminently doable. I've talked about many aspects of my life in the literally hundreds of articles I've written for SEO Chat, but there are certain things I won't discuss – because they're private, or because some of my readers might find them offensive. So cater to your readers' tastes. You can certainly spice things up a bit, but let's face it, you wouldn't serve steak tartare to a table full of vegetarians, right?
Okay, once you get a general idea of what you're going to serve, you need to look up some recipes. What this means in the context of a blog entry is, you need to do some research. And unlike many cooks, you won't want to copy a recipe exactly. “Before you sit down and write an article, it's important to search the web for articles like your idea,” Patel notes. “One of the things that I do is take the headline that I'm thinking about using and drop it into the Google search box. Then I look at what comes up.”
In the context of a blog entry, that might mean that you find some provocative research, an analyst's opinion relevant to the research, and form your own point of view about it all. There are plenty of ways you can combine different ideas, but you need to add something original to make a blog entry – or a dish – truly yours.
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