The Importance of a Content Skeleton for How-To Blogs (With 7 Reasons)

The Importance of a Content Skeleton for How-To Blogs (With 7 Reasons)

Just as bones make up the framework of the human body, the content skeleton makes up the foundation for any form of content.

Written materials are a huge part of the web as we make searches every day to fill our curiosities or look up information. 

Now, how relevant the content we are looking for or how the content caters to a group of audience lies in the hands of the writer. One of the preliminary steps is to create the content skeleton.

What does content skeleton mean and what constitutes part of the skeleton for how-to blogs are mentioned below.

What is Content Skeleton?

Content skeleton means a framework for any written material. For instance, when you’re writing a how-to blog, the first step is to figure out the subject. Let’s say you’re writing about how to make Caesar salad. 

Figuring out the subject followed by the elements, such as the ingredients required and the steps to make the salad are all part of the content skeleton.

They are elements that make up the finished piece. Not just that, the content skeleton also gives direction to your content as it lets readers figure out the type and subsequently market your content to the right demographic.

At heart, the primary purpose of the content skeleton is to make writing efficient. Meaning, that the structure helps you write faster and with no compromise on the quality. Users who come to a page to read an article usually scan through the entirety to see how the blog is broken down, so the content skeleton plays a big role in readability.

The beauty of content skeleton is it’s not limited to a particular genre and can be seamlessly used across fiction, non-fiction writing, and everything in between. It owes it all to its simplicity and ease of usability. A content skeleton is not only beneficial for beginners but seasoned writers as well.

7 Reasons Are Content Skeletons are Important

Once you’ve established an understanding of content skeleton meaning, you can move on to structure your blogs. But it’s important to keep certain pointers in mind.

1. Helps in Content Structure

The essence behind creating a skeleton is to give form to your writing. What you will be putting into your blog post, where the sub-headings will go, and in what order? All these are part of the structuring process.

Accomplishing the task of structured writing is a big catalyst in making your content readable and accessible. Readers on the internet are busy and might not have all the time in the day to scroll through a 1,000-word article. 

Maintaining a tangible structure helps retain the reader onto your post and your site when you make the information, you’re providing easy to scan and digest.

At the same time, it helps you figure out the type of content you’re writing, whether it’s a blog post, a how-to guide, a lookbook, and so on.

The structure is not only important in scoring high readability but also proves helpful in making your content visible and optimizable to search engines.

Maintaining relevancy and keeping all elements in check will make your content stand out amongst the rest. It will give your content credibility.

2. Keeps the Momentum Going

With writing, there’s always a thought of writer’s block looming above your head. But project deadlines won’t necessarily be considerate about a said block. 

This is where beginning with a content skeleton helps in building momentum. Once you have the outline of the subject it becomes easier to put them into sentences and flesh out an article or blog.

It helps maintain a flow within your work without having to take breaks now and again. It can also be a discipline-building exercise for budding writers who find themselves in the throes of writer’s block ever so often.

The content skeleton also happens to allow plenty of room for creativity as it lets you jump from topic to topic and correlate them without having to confine yourself to one sub-topic.

3. Room For Plenty of Information

The main point of the content skeleton is to focus on the objectives of any project and surround the material.

This provides an opportunity for adding important information wherever necessary and meeting word count deadlines as well as making the article not seem like it is saturated with irrelevant information.

Sure, most users are unlikely to read all through the blog and this is where providing related information along with the main points helps in answering related queries that a user might have gone on to search for in other blogs.

Making a habit out of combining different pieces of information and tying them down into articles is a great way to make it even more engaging.

How-to blogs are an excellent way of doing that as the recipe behind converting how-to blogs is adding FAQ sections that answer other queries users might have which are related to the process.

4. Makes Writing Efficient and Rich

Writing requires you to consider the artistic as well as the technical part of the content. Apart from constantly working on improving the quality many elements such as SEO and readability have to be equally kept in mind.

While as separate entities they can take up a significant portion of the writer’s time, efficiency throughout the process can help you get things done quicker.

When you’ve already established the skeleton for your content it leaves space for the rest of the elements to fit into the bigger picture.

This also helps in the editing and revision processes making the content rich and nuanced. The purpose behind a content skeleton after all is to establish clarity and help users find the answers they are looking for.

In addition, it lets you add perspective to your piece and make correlations between all the topics and subtopics. Similar to storytelling, the content skeleton lets your content progress from portion to portion.

5. Organize Ideas and Thoughts

With most writing techniques the goal is to make any piece of content readable by the users. And to do that, you must start by answering the search intent which is a primary step in getting the big picture.

Once the idea is established you can add the subsequent pointers or sub-headings that could go along with the main goal. This is where the content skeleton comes in.

The aim of a content skeleton as mentioned before is to act as a guide for not just the writer but the user to navigate through high word-count content. 

Using the skeleton helps you identify what to implement and what not to put into the blog thus helping you organize all the pieces of information you find along the way during the research process.

The very foundation of the content skeleton is to organize ideas and thoughts without being overwhelmed by information.

6. Emphasize Important and Related Topics

An ideal content skeleton should have sections and sub-sections that break the content down into digestible chunks. This can be done by adding a table of contents.

Each section and sub-section in turn helps in emphasizing important topics as well as related topics and make blogs more succinct. 

As in the case of how-to blogs for hairstyles for summer, adding haircare products and diving briefly into the features of the products provides a comprehensive guide for the users.

At the same time, your content builds credibility. Specific content or content that provides a lot more information can be seen as reliable but only when done right and is relevant to the main objective otherwise it’s redundant.

Furthermore, it helps you stick to the topic without deviating and being all over the place. The more specific you are with your research the more likely you know what to look for and how to look for this leads to finding the exact data you are looking for.

7. Saves Time

As the saying goes, a stitch in time saves nine, and establishing a content skeleton early on in a project is a definite way to save the hassle of doing last-minute changes in the structure.

As you research for your material along the way you might come across information that could deserve its heading or sub-heading which again might disrupt the flow of the entire blog.

Having a skeleton comes in handy to avert those challenges by giving you space to add additional related information to the existing subheadings without making any major changes.

Incorporating images is another fun way to spice up your content. This gives you a big plus on the readability score and makes your content scannable to users. 

Verdict

Writing can be an intimidating process for even the most experienced writer but routines and habits can make overcoming the dreaded step of beginning a project easier to tackle.

The content skeleton is one such habit that effectively helps writers get through a process with as few obstacles and blocks as possible while simultaneously helping them churn out quality content without any compromises.