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Cornwall Museums Partnership

How to Write a Blog

Cornwall Museums Partnership’s Marketing and Impact Officer, Jody Woolcock, has put together a simple step-by-step document on how to write a blog. Please use this template as a rough guideline – not all blogs can follow this template, but this should help you identify what goes where and how long each paragraph should be.

 

  1. The Lead

The first step is to write your lead. This term describes the first paragraph, the hook of your story where your job is to grab the attention of the reader.

How do you hook your reader? Identify a problem that your reader desperately wants solved.

Length: 100-200 words

 

  1. Make it personal

Don’t just give out the information but summon the emotion to tell your story in a way that makes your audience care, connect and want to take action.

Here you want to create a sense of trust and identify with the reader.

Length: 100 – 200 words

 

  1. What have others said?

This is a great place to use case studies, public/user testimonials, or your own story. This can be woven throughout the blog so don’t feel it needs to be a set-in stone paragraph.

Length: 150 – 250 words

 

  1. Core elements

Make sure to remember the core points of your post don’t need to come until you’re halfway through the article. Most put it all in the beginning, but you want to firstly set the scene before putting the core points throughout the middle of your blog.

Length: 150 – 250 words

 

  1. Call to action

Another word for this is the “conclusion,” and surprisingly, many people skip it. However, it’s the single best place to connect the dots and show the reader where you’ve come, from the beginning of your topic/project, until the end.

Length: 100 – 200 words

 

The word count for each section can be more or less depending on the topic. If it becomes too long, a series of blogs might be more fitting. In total, your blog wants to be between 300-600 words, but this can be more or less dependent on the topic.

 

Other areas to remember when writing a blog are…

Images

Ideally, you want to add an image at the beginning of the blog and before/after each section. Depending on the length of blog, between 2-5 images would be sufficient.

When using an image, providing a caption is really helpful as this can be used within the blog, or to label the photo making it searchable in Google.

Links

If you are mentioning a company, person, project or social media page that isn’t yours then a good habit to get into is linking it in your blog. For example, if we were to mention Cornwall Museums Partnership, we’d link to their page by using a hyperlink.

Font and Size

When posting to CMP’s website we use a generic font and size, but a suggestion for anyone doing their own blogs would be;

Main title: 16/18

Headers: 14

Body of text: 12

Font: something clear like Corbel or Calibri.

Another thing to note is avoiding anything in CAPITAL LETTERS as it could come across a bit shouty.

Referencing

When using a quote or someone else’s work, be sure to ‘pop the sentence(s) in quotation marks’ and say where it comes from. For example; Cornwall Museums Partnership say, ‘We think that museums create moments of wonder which enrich people’s lives.’ Italics also make it stand out a little more.

Copyright

Be careful when using images and text taken from another website or from Google Images. A lot of these will be protected under copyright and if caught, could land us in a bit of trouble.

You can search on Google for images that are labelled for reuse, or use something like Shutterstock and Pexels for royalty free images.

If using images from a website or photographer, as long as you have permission (preferably written/email) then you can use them.

 

Download a copy of the Blog-Template.

Jody Woolcock

– Marketing and Impact Officer

Our Funders