When most people hear “content writing”, they think “writing articles”.

However, writing content isn’t just important for blog posts.

In fact, content writing is important for all types of different content formats, including:

• Video scripts
• Email newsletters
• Keynote speeches
• Social media posts
• Podcast titles
• White papers
• Web page copy
• Landing pages
• YouTube video descriptions

Or put another way:

Writing is the foundation for pretty much any content that you publish.

Best Practices

Create an Outline

Creating an outline is a GREAT first step in the content writing process.

Outlines help your content come out better for two main reasons:

First, outlines force you to put all your thoughts down in an organized way (rather than writing everything off the top of your head). Which really speeds up the writing process.

Second, outlines usually lead to a much better structure for your content. That’s because an outline lets you see your content from a “high level” that’s impossible to see as you’re writing.

Plus, because you have an outline, your final content will hit all of the major points that you set out to before you started writing.

So: how do you actually go about creating an effective outline?

Here are three main strategies that work well:

• Use a previous piece of content that did well: For example, we tend to publish quite a few definitive guides here at Backlinko.
• So when we start working on a new guide, we use a lot of the structure from our existing guides as a base.
• Use a template: Most professional content writers work off of proven templates. Here are 5 content templates you can use to create outlines.
• Use top-performing content: Check out BuzzSumo to find popular content that you can use as the basis for your outline.

  For example, let’s say you’re about to write a guest post about the keto diet.

  Well, you’d want to type “keto diet” into BuzzSumo to see what’s already done w