Hello again, by this point you know who your audience is, and you have some great blog titles to help you get started, it's time to begin your outline. Now, not everyone likes outlining blogs in advance. But this lesson is going to show you why outlines are important and how they can save you a lot of headache. So now you have a working title and you know what you're going to write about, it is time to plan what you want to say by writing an outline that is actually good. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to spin up outlines that are actually useful and will save you time down the road. You'll also know how your outline can show a client what you're going to write about to avoid mistakes and miscommunications.

Now, because this course is designed for intermediate content writers, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on how you should write your outline. These are things you should already know. Your outline maps out what your blog post is going to say. Your outline shows you the writer where you should go next, whenever you get stuck or bored while you're writing your outline in this way, it makes your actual writing of a draft a lot faster and easier. So what should your outline look like? Again, the style of your outline is up to you.

Personally, I like to use full subheadings and sentences when I write an outline because it makes the actual draft process go a lot faster. Now, if you want to, you could just write one word for each point you want to make. The only important thing is you want your outline to make sense and clearly show what you're going to write. Not just for you, but for other people. Now, a lot of writers ask, do I actually need an outline because some writers really hate outlining they feel boxed in by them. They feel like they're having to follow a strict structure that doesn't really work with their style.

Other writers really like the security of it. blanket and clear plan and an outline provides. So do you actually need an outline? I'm going to tell you yes. And here's the big reason why. For content writing outlines are a great tool for controlling client expectations.

They save you headaches in this way. If you use outlines, well, you're going to save yourself a lot of frustration whenever you write content, because as a content writer, you are writing words for stakeholders to read. These stakeholders are probably the people that are managing you and paying you to write content. So before you get in front of your primary audience, the people you want to persuade the consumers that are going to read your blog, you have to please the people who are paying you to make the content for those consumers. These people are those stakeholders, your boss, your editor and your client. Your outline is crucial to managing their expectations for what's going to be in the final draft.

It will show them the main points and the title that you're going to cover. It'll include the evidence and statistics you'll use to make your case, it will define the call to action the link you're going to have at the end of your blog. And most importantly, your outline will show you if you're missing anything important that your client really wants to go in there. By sharing an outline with your client, you can get fixes quickly instead of having to write an entire draft and having them tell you what's wrong. If your outline is dead wrong, or if you're missing some really important points, you can fix an outline in about an hour or less. If you've already written an entire rough draft and your client doesn't like where it's going, then you've lost all the time you took choosing the right words, structuring your sentences and everything actually completing that draft in this way outlines our time insurance, they protect you from 11th hour changes that your client wants to shove something into your post after you already have a good draft.

This way they can add it to your outline instead of forcing you to To fix it once the draft has already been written. So now that you have an outline and you have your title, it's time to actually start writing a good blog post. In the next lesson, I'm going to walk you through some very proven strategies for opening your blog post and nailing your audience's attention.