8. The Lifeline of an Outline

Stephanie 0:00

When your time for content creation is limited, it can feel like creating an outline is just an extra step you don't really need. But in reality, outlining is a step you can't afford to skip.

Stephanie 0:13

Hey there teacher business owner, it's time to give your bank account a break and pause that ad campaign. I'm your host, Stephanie Royer, and I'm going to show you how to pay less for traffic.

Stephanie 0:25

Welcome back to the podcast, we are going to continue auditing your workflow step by step. We're looking for hurdles that could be getting in your way as you try to create effective blog content for your teacher business. In our last episode, we talked about the importance of beginning with the end in mind.

Stephanie 0:44

So once you've selected the goal of your blog post, which is usually to increase traffic to a specific product, then it's time to think about the actual content of your blog post. What are you going to write? But you're going to need to pump the brakes if this is normally where you just start writing. I highly, highly recommend outlining your blog post before you start writing. An outline will help you keep your thoughts organized as you do keyword research. It will improve the readability of your content for both robots and humans. And it will ultimately save you a lot of time.

Stephanie 1:22

We're not going to dive too far into the specifics of keyword research in this episode. But I wanted to talk about how outlining can just it can help you stay organized as you are looking for keywords to use in your post. Typically, after you've selected a general topic to write about, based on the product you want to highlight in the post, you'll then move on to doing some form of keyword research. The point of this research is to help you find the specific wording that you should use in your post to help Google make sense of your content and to get it in front of the right people. So the more effective your keyword research, the better your chances that people will find your blog post.

Stephanie 2:04

As you look for keyword ideas to use in your blog posts, you can put them into your outline so that you don't forget to use them. Because I don't know about you, but when I'm doing keyword research, I'll notice a really good opportunity and think Oh, yep, I want to make sure I use that keyword in my post. And then it just becomes a jumble of keywords. So it's good to go ahead and store those in your outline. Another way that outlines helped me is when I'm doing competitor analysis as part of keyword research. So I will notice that all of the ranking posts, they all use a particular talking point, they all have the same header at some point in their blog post. Now, obviously, I'm not copying the text of their posts. But that tells me I really do need to make sure I address that issue in my post as well, because Google is going to expect that from me if all of the other ranking posts are talking about that issue. And so I will make note of that in my outline, to make sure that I cover that topic in my post.

Stephanie 3:02

Another important reason to use an outline is that it makes your blog posts easier for your audience to read and easier for the Google bots to crawl.

Stephanie 3:12

So I have a little analogy for this. Since we're still in yard sale season. . .

Stephanie 3:16

Imagine that you have a lot of yard sales to go to on a Saturday morning, like you have a whole list and you're on the hunt for a particular size of clothing for a little one in your life, whether it's your child, grandchild, family friend, but you have committed to looking for this particular size of clothing. So at the first yard sale, you notice a big pile of clothes plopped onto a tarp on the ground, you can tell that this pile of clothing has some kid stuff in there, but it's hard to tell what the sizes would be unless you really dig through the pile. Now you have a lot of yard sales to get to. So you decide you don't have the time or energy to dig through this pile, and you move on to the next yard sale instead.

Stephanie 3:59

At the next sale, you notice that they have a table of children's clothing sorted and folded nicely with labels clearly marking the sizes of each pile. You head straight to that table and take a few minutes to look through the options they have in the size you need. And you end up finding a couple of things and you're able to move on to the next sale.

Stephanie 4:20

What does this have to do with outlining a blog? Well, actually a lot.

Stephanie 4:25

If your readers are met with a wall of text on your blog post with absolutely no structure, they are more than likely going to bounce, they're not going to read a single word of it. It's like that big pile of unsorted clothing at the first yard sale. Most blog readers are skimmers. If you don't make your content skimmable you are most likely going to lose your audience.

Stephanie 4:48

Creating an outline is the easiest way to ensure that your content is well organized for your readers and a little more skimmable when you have headings for the different sections with appropriate subheadings it is so much easier for people to see just at a glance. If your blog post has what they're looking for, they'll be more likely to stay and read once they confirm that the content they need is in your post.

Stephanie 5:13

Now let's go back to our little analogy. You see a friend at the next yard sale, and she asks if you've been to any sales with clothing of a specific size. So where would you send your friend? Would you recommend the first yard sale the one with a giant unsorted pile of clothing on a tarp? Or would you recommend the sale with the labeled piles,

Stephanie 5:35

I know that I'd probably send my friend at the sale where I could guarantee that I had seen a particular size on a label, those organized clothing piles made it much more likely that I would recommend that sale to someone else.

Stephanie 5:48

The organization of your blog post can impact how Google is able to index and then recommend your content. When you have clear headers that outline the content of your blog post, it's easier for the bots to make sense of your content, they're more likely to recommend it in search results when it's clear that your blog post has the information people are looking for. Outlining your post can make sure that you have a sufficient framework in place to help the bots crawl your content.

Stephanie 6:16

Now let's go back to the very beginning of the episode where I mentioned that outlining can feel like an unnecessary task, especially when time is limited.

Stephanie 6:25

It might feel like just one more thing. But outlining can make the blogging process so much easier. In fact, you'll probably find that it saves you time in the long run. I'll just give you a little illustration from my own life between client work and my own blog, I write a lot every week. I write a lot of blog posts, and I write them without any help from AI. It's all 100% me. Now I'd be lying if I said that I never had trouble finding the words for a post. Because honestly, sometimes when I sit down at the computer, and I'm under the time crunch of a deadline, I find myself with zero inspiration for the post. And I can get worried because the clock is ticking. And this post needs to be ready within the next couple of hours.

Stephanie 7:10

But without fail, every time I start outlining, it gets easier, because by the time I've created the framework of talking points, it just becomes this game of fill in the blanks. If I'm really having a hard time coming up with the words for the post, I hop around to different sections, I find the talking points where the words seem to flow more easily. And I focus on those. And then after just a couple of sections, I usually find my momentum and I quickly finished the rest of the post.

Stephanie 7:41

Outlining can also get rid of that blank page overwhelm. Sometimes when you're looking at a brand new blank page in WordPress or Google Docs, wherever you draft your posts, it can just feel daunting sometimes. And when you outline, it takes away that blank screen overwhelm. And it also breaks up the process of writing that post into these manageable chunks. And this saves a lot of time because what happens when we're faced with a task that is daunting and feels unmanageable, well, we put it off, we procrastinate. We drag our feet and take forever getting it done. And so I like having an outline with the different chunks, because sometimes I'll just say, Okay, I'm setting the timer for 25 minutes, I'm gonna give myself that long to fill in two sections of this post. And more often than not, I get those two sections done, and then some, and the momentum has already started and it's really easy to finish.

Stephanie 8:40

Another way that outlining can save you time is because it keeps you on topic. When you have a clear roadmap for the post, you're less likely to waste time writing paragraphs of text that really won't help you reach the goal of your post, you are able to stay lightning focused and only write the words that matter.

Stephanie 8:59

My final tip is for those of you who love to batch, because outlining is an awesome task to batch, you can take a day for keyword research and outlining where you create outlines for all of your upcoming blog posts. This means that you're not going to waste time and mental effort with decision fatigue. When it's time for blog writing day, you'll have everything set up and ready to go. Now this isn't to say you have to batch your outlines in order to save time. I actually don't batch outlines because for me and the way my brain works, my start to finish writing time is faster. When I outline while I keyword research, and I do that keyword research right before I write the post. That is the way that I am able to write blog posts the most quickly and you could have a totally different preference and that's okay, but the main part is doing the outlines in the first place because however you decide to do it, it will ultimately save you time.

Stephanie 9:57

I hope that this episode has given you some food for thought thought when it comes to using outlines as part of your content creation process, it will save you so much time in the long run. But it will also help you write more effective blog posts, your audience will be able to find what they need, which will probably lead to more sales in your TPT store. And Google will be able to crawl your content more efficiently, and will be more likely to recommend your blog posts to new readers.

Stephanie 9:57

During your next work session, I would invite you to figure out where in your workflow you could add outlining. Just to give you an idea, I've mentioned my workflow already in this episode. But I create an outline in Google Docs when I sit down to do keyword research, I just type doc dot new into the address bar in Google Chrome, and a new document pops up and I'm ready to go. I add to that outline as I do my keyword research. And then I just finish up the headings in just a few minutes before I start to write. Now you might decide to batch several outlines at once before you write like I mentioned batching earlier. But in that case, you can save the link to the outline in your blog post tracker. Now I don't create a separate outline field in my tracker. If I do ever batch outlines in advance, I would just put the URL to the Google doc in the spot where the blog post URL will go once it's written. And then when the post is finished, I would just swap out those links.

Stephanie: 11:26

I have good news for you. If you are a student of bring your own traffic. I have an entire lesson in that course that talks about creating an outline for your blog posts. And I also include a sample template that you can use to help you outline and just gives you an example of what I use as an outline for my blog posts. But no matter how you decide to outline within your workflow, it will definitely be worth the small amount of time that it takes.

Stephanie: 11:54

I'm really looking forward to our next episode where we will continue to audit your content creation workflow. Be sure to follow the pay less for traffic podcast so you don't miss it.

Stephanie: 12:05

Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this conversation, I'd love it if you could share it with a teacher because bestie you have created high quality resources. Now let's help teachers find them. I'll see you next time.