There’s a recurring formula for most of my blogs which you may have understandably missed because who gives a shit about a random blogger that sporadically posts content more than 8 billion people in world don’t even know exist. It’s a lazy template that gets the job done quick without being mentally taxing for beginning bloggers. I don’t recommend this style for established content creators here because it’s a downgrade to the high bar you may have already set yourself. This is more for the people that want to start taking a feel for their blogging until they found their inner voice.
I found my inner voice and it sounds reeeeeeeeeee weeessnaw so you know where the inspirational shitposting voice comes from. But let’s get started.
The post is already summarized on the first and second paragraph. Get off that overthinking head that spoilers will spoil the post’s twist unless you’re writing a story to build up tension. Most posts here aren’t under the creative literature category. It’s more like how your day went, throwback, reflection and what you did last x date. If you can summarize what the post is about on the first paragraph, you’re doing people a favor.
Rationale: People online have shorter attention spans and are conditioned to seek out novelty. If you’re trying to build up hype over things people don’t care about, there’s a good chance they probably wasted their time reading something you are invested into but they’re not. It’s not a pleasant experience when you go into someone’s blog after getting baited by the title only to come up disappointed after the succeeding paragraphs. Say what the business is about first and let readers decide if they want to buy what you’re selling. That’s why stating in the introduction what the post is all about sets an expectation of what they’re getting into and if it’s not their cup of tea, they leave.
I think people can sometimes try so hard on their blog to hook interest thinking it may raise their chances for a vote here. Listen, you can write the best stuff about oranges but if I’m into apples, I’ll less likely stick around to read more about your post. That’s just how things go when competing for attention online and I’m sure everyone here skips content on their feeds. If people are interested in your subject, they will read and they will finish it if it’s worth their time.
Dragging the subject on with a few more paragraphs creates hype that eventually may leave a letdown of expectations. Respect your readers’ time and just let them know what they are getting into from the start.
Step 2: Body. This is the part of the post where you yap about the topic. The simple approach is answering the who, what, where, when and how of the topic.
What: A travel
Who: You and mentioned someone else with you with a snippet of their background.
Where: To Antarctica because why not?
When: Lunch time.
How: You have mysterious ways.
You can make extensive paragraphs just by answering these questions to get the creative juice flowing. Don’t entertain thoughts like what if nobody is going to read it, what if it’s not a good post, what if this and that? Listen, the objective here is to get a blog, having people like your content is a separate thing and it’s a bit more complex than saying write something interesting about your interested niche. If there’s one of the many irrational things I learned from blogging on Hive, it’s that even the most useless posts can still get paid and the decent ones get nothing but scraps. You tell me a children’s drawing done on digital media gets 20$ of votes is worth it and I’ll believe you because that’s not up for me to decide how people use their stake.
So if you’re too paralyzed to write a great content to please an invisible audience that may or may not exist out there, you’re not doing yourself a favor not getting that blog published soon. The controversial opinion I have about most content on Hive is that posts can sometimes get voted on because that’s how stake holders benefit from the curation rewards, and sometimes it doesn’t need to be a quality shitpost because we’ll be excluding a lot of people from the roster if we’re just after quality. If anyone claims that they make great content on a constant basis, the initial question that pops in my head is whether I should be asking if this person has a substantial following outside the space and how often their content gets engagement or viral status.
You can just ignore the who, what, where, when and how format and go freestyle story telling or something. This is what experimentation is for content creation. Sometimes a content that’s poorly structured and spontaneous can be entertaining as seen from viral candid moments. Content doesn’t have to necessarily have a structured plan to be good but having structure gives you some consistency, it really depends on what you want to accomplish as a creator because there’s no one size fits all advice in content creation. You can do all the right things by the book and still come out unnoticed by the algorithm.
Step 3: Conclusion
A reiteration of the introduction with added bits of reflection. The body should have already highlighted your main points about the subject and people can already figure out their conclusions on their own, which they would likely value more than your version, maybe. Think of last paragraphs as a sign out where you double down on your statements made from the introduction and body. OR you can ignore this part and just make a short statement about how bad, nice, or meh you think the subject is. At this point, the reader may have already clicked away on something else to distract their time.
I patterned this from my old high school essays because I initially found it hard to blog overthinking about the what ifs nobody likes my stuff or this and that, with other motives like is it even vote worthy and shit? As a content creator, if your stuff is even worth consuming, you wouldn’t need to convince people to share it or talk about it, they would do that themselves for free. If it’s not interesting, no one is going to bother to see it and just take it as a lesson to do better.
What’s important is consistency and experimenting with how you write your ideas over time. If something doesn’t work, you can try something new, think less about the image and branding, that stuff would come after you put in the work in putting out content people will actually care about. Assuming you’re a beginning blogger trying to make a name for yourself, it’s better to assume your posts are cast out into the void hoping there’s a niche audience that would fish it out of the sea of content.
I call it my lazy format to posting because I don't need to try so hard to produce gimmicks just to get a blog going. There are no fans waiting for me to produce a blockbuster per post. And for those struggling to impress the unseen voters, your chances of getting paid for your posts will remain 0 until you actually start posting.
It’s disappointing to see no validation like comments or votes to a posts but isn’t this more of a normal thing because everyone has to start as insignificant. Start simple with a lazy format, don’t overthink the content when starting out and then improve on that format or figure out what works for you.
