Day 2 – Tuesday: How to evaluate your flow

Reverse-outlining helps you see whether your flow is logical.

When speedbumps block the natural flow of your article, you’re slowing readers down, and you may lose them.

To reverse outline a post, you (1) decide what’s the big idea (i.e. the key lesson) and (2) what the building blocks of the post are.

Here’s an example of my guest post on Boost Blog Traffic: The Sin of Originality (and the Truth About Building a Popular Blog)

Example of a blog post evaluation by reverse-outlining

Big idea:
You don’t need to be creative to be popular. A smarter way is to steal (in an ethical way!).

Building blocks:
1. Intro – you’re looking for originality, aren’t you? Well originality can hurt you.
2. Why you don’t need an original topic
3. Proof why you don’t need to be creative (from a copywriting genius)
4. Proof why you don’t need to be creative (from a famous painter)
5. How to study writing (and steal success formulas)
6. Why you need a swipe file & how to create one using Evernote
7. Real life example of how swiping works
8. Conclusion – Quit doubting your talent and get to work

Analysis:
a. Because people might be hesitant about why they’d need to steal, the post uses proof (#3 and #4) and examples (#7, but also in #4) to persuade the reader to start “stealing”.

b. Something strange happens in #2 – while the whole post is about becoming a better writer, #2 is about an original topic – this doesn’t work. (Jon added this part in later as he thought my intro was too short).

c. The conclusion could have been more inspirational. While Quit doubting your talent and get to work are the main points, quite a few other suggestions are made.

Your action points for today:

Choose a blog post – it can be a blog post you’ve written or one by someone else
Read the post carefully (a couple of times) and create a reverse-outline
Post your reverse-outline and findings in the forum

Enchant readers. Woo customers. Win business.