Create A Checklist For Your Blog: A Guide

Pat Walls

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Updated: September 12th, 2024

What Is A Checklist?

Checklists provide readers with a concise list of tasks for how to solve a specific problem.

This type of content typically drives your customer to download, use, and share your content - all great ways to improve your SEO and brand exposure.

Key Takeaways

Checklists can be a very effective form of content marketing
Checklists should be created based on a challenge or subject your target audience faces.
Checklists should be short, to the point, and identify the most critical steps in a process.

Understanding Checklists

Checklists can be some of the most effective and rewarding types of content you produce.

If done properly, with the end-user in mind, these can become high converting pieces of content.

It's important to keep in mind that checklists are not guides - they are typically bulleted items that identify tasks, priorities and deadlines. Your checklist should not describe every step in the process.

There are dozens of tools you can use to create a checklist for free, such as Canva or Google Docs

Real World Examples: Create A Checklist For Your Blog

1. Hubspot Checklists

Hubspot is known to have one of the best blogs, mainly because of the quality and variety of content they produce.

In addition to writing up a lengthy blog post, they will often provide the user with a checklist that they can download.

This is usually the first thing users see when they open the blog post:

Then, when you go to download the checklist, they have you input your contact details - another genius way of collecting emails and generating new prospects for their actual product: a CRM software:

Once you provide this information, they provide you with a PDF checklist that's designed well and easy to navigate:

2. Process Street SEO Checklist

Process Street created an amazing and interactive checklist for SEO and keyword research.

For a more complex subject like SEO, this requires a bit more context and steps involved. If you just said "Find Keywords" as one of the bullet points with zero context, your checklist would not be helpful.

The content is designed to have a checklist on the left-hand side, along with content to the right hand side that dives deeper into the subject:

Once you click the box to check off an item, it takes you directly to a page to create your account. This is a smart tactic, because on the surface it seems like this checklist is available to use right away, but instead, they capture your contact info before you can engage with the checklist:

How To Create A Checklist:

Here are some important things to keep in mind when writing your checklist:

Understand the goal: Each item on the checklist gets your user one step closer to the end objective.
Research: If you are creating a checklist, you should be an expert on the subject. In addition, see what other people have done - you might not think you are missing anything, but it's always helpful to get another perspective
Write down all your points before designing the checklist: This will help you organize and identify if there's anything missing
Create short titles for each task that reflect the objective
Write a short description for each task:This should not be a guide, but it should be detailed enough to give the task some context.
Create sub-points: Some tasks may need a short checklist of their own
Revise & Publish!

Real World Examples: Create A Checklist