You will write, edit and format a complete blog post from your outline.
You have a question from a real customer, an outline that answers it first, and a first-hand detail for every section. This is the part many people put off for weeks: actually writing the post. The outline makes it much easier than starting from nothing, and the steps below take you from a blank page to a finished post in one sitting.
Allow about 45 minutes for writing and formatting, plus time for one reader.
Open your outline from lesson 6.2 and your voice-of-customer file. Write the post from top to bottom without stopping to edit. Do not fix typos, rewrite sentences, or go back to improve the opening. Just get every section down.
Writing and editing use different parts of your attention. If you edit while you write, you stop every few sentences, lose the thread, and often never finish. A rough complete draft is far more useful than a polished first paragraph.
Use customer phrases as you go. If a parent in your file wrote "she understands in class, then blanks at home", use those words when you describe the situation. Readers recognise themselves in them.
Aim for 800 to 1,200 words. Shorter than that, and you probably have not covered the examples and exceptions. Longer, and you may be answering more than one question.
Priya wrote her first draft of "Tuition or more practice at home? How to tell which your child needs" in about 25 minutes. It came out at 1,150 words, with a weak ending and two paragraphs that said the same thing.
Now make the draft easy to scan. Readers on a phone skim first and read second.
Use the headings from your outline. Check that each one makes sense on its own, as lesson 6.2 described. Break long paragraphs into shorter ones, most of them three or four sentences. Where the content really is a list, such as signs to look for or steps to follow, use a list. Where ideas connect to each other, keep them as prose. A post made entirely of bullet points reads like notes.
Add at least one image of the real thing: a photo from your work, a page of working with names removed, your actual product. Stock photos add nothing a reader can learn from. Write a short caption that says what the image shows.
Priya added a photo of a student's worksheet with the mistake circled in red, with the student's name and school removed and the parent's permission. The caption read "Same mistake, three questions in a row. The method was wrong, not the arithmetic."
Read the whole draft aloud, once, from start to finish. You can read it quietly to yourself, but say every word.
Reading aloud catches what reading silently misses. Sentences that are too long leave you out of breath. Phrases you would never say to a customer sound stiff in your own voice. Repetition becomes obvious.
As you read, cut anything you would not say to a customer in person. "Within the competitive educational environment of Singapore" goes, because you would never say it across a table. So does "It is important to note that", and so do paragraphs that repeat an earlier point.
Priya cut her post from 1,150 words to 980. Most of the cut came from merging the two paragraphs that said the same thing and removing an opening sentence about how "every child is unique".
Find one person in your target group who has not seen the post. Ask them to read it the way they would normally read a blog post, on their phone if that is how they usually read. Then ask one question: where did you get bored, or start skimming?
Do not ask whether they liked it. As you saw in lesson 1.3, people are polite, and the answer tells you little. The question about boredom gets a specific, useful answer, because it asks about something that happened.
Note exactly where they lost interest. That section is usually too long, too general, or missing an example. Fix it, then publish.
Priya's reader, a parent from her estate, said she started skimming at the section on "What tuition can do that practice cannot", because "it started sounding like an ad". Priya rewrote it with an example of what a tutor noticed that the parent had missed, and moved the line about her trial lessons to the very end.
You have a blog post of 800 to 1,200 words that answers one real customer question. It gives the answer in the first paragraph, has headings that make sense on their own, uses customer phrases, contains at least one first-hand example and one image of the real thing, and names its author. You also have a note of where your test reader lost interest and what you changed. Publish it, or have it ready to publish, and keep the note.
Set a timer when you start the first draft. Most people find that the writing takes less time than they feared, and the time they save goes into the edit and the reader, which is where the post gets better.
Write and format a blog post of 800 to 1,200 words on one customer question and record where your test reader lost interest.
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