Blog post writing seems to be straightforward enough. Pick a topic, choose your keywords, write a catchy title and make it interesting to read. Everyone will love it! I’ll share it on social media and get some new visitors and subscribers. Right? Well, it all depends on how serious you are about blogging. If you run a business, you need to do a little more than that. That’s why I created the human blog writer checklist 2025. You might not do all of the things on this list, but I hope it gives you some ideas for improving your blog writing.
I’ve been a blogger for more than 25 years, managing as many as 50 company blogs and producing 1800+ article per week and I still don’t know everything. So please, if you have things to add to this guide, let me know in the comments and maybe I’ll add your suggestions and link back to your blog.
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How Will AI Affect Human Bloggers in 2025?
Human Blog Writer Checklist 2025 (Before you write your blogpost)
Okay Human Bloggers Time To Write
The Human Blog Writer’s Checklist Includes Some Things to Check Before You Hit Publish (After your writing is done.)
Human Blog Writers Do It Better
ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, if you’re reading this, don’t be too insulted. But human blog writers are much better at blogging than you are. Here’s a few reasons why…
Emotion: AI has a problem understanding, connecting with, and responding sensitively to human feelings. Sorry, my AI buddies, human skills include: persuasion, self-awareness, ethics, listening, storytelling, and sales.
Complexity: AI is weak at navigating ambiguous, broad-context challenges with holistic problem-solving. Human blog writers have complex problem-solving, sense-making, risk management, strategy, vision, and intuition.
Creativity: AI doesn’t have the ability to generate original, novel ideas and solutions. Human blog writers have imagination, ideation, aesthetic judgment, lateral thinking, artistic expression, and curiosity.
Sorry AI, human blog writers beat blogs written by AI in too many ways to ignore. I had to include a section about AI since this checklist is for 2025.
How Will AI Affect Human Bloggers in 2025?
A human blog writer could easily get frustrated with the large amount of AI generated articles and blog posts being cranked out every day. Some worry about their jobs. What I can tell you is this; AI Trainers have scraped the web for almost every bit of information there is. If they continue to scrape the web to train their AI tools, they are scraping content written by AI. That will cause an infinite loop and they know this already.
What does that mean for human blog writers? Content written by humans is going to increase in value. AI researchers are already hiring PHDs and others to help train their AI models. AI detection tools will get better.
Google already uses algorithms to analyze text structure, grammar, syntax, and other aspects of content to detect patterns that indicate AI-generated content.
Google has said they don’t care if the content is AI generated, then why are they working so hard to be able to detect it?
My prediction: At some point, Google will do an update that kills off 80-90% of all AI generated content. I look back to history. Article marketing was a big thing in the early 2000s. You wrote an article, submitted it to an article directory and the links back to your website added to your link popularity.
Then along came article spinning software that would create 5 “supposedly original” articles out of one article. The article directories got flooded with this poor quality content.
Then along came Google’s Panda update. Almost all of the articles directories died soon after. All those links and articles were suddenly worthless.
The same thing is coming for AI generated content. My company back then stuck to writing original content for our clients. Panda didn’t hurt any of my client’s content, it actually improved the rankings for us.
Human Content Will Always Be in Demand. Stick to your guns. Human blog writers will prevail because history repeats itself. It’s possible that Google could release an update to address the flood of low-quality AI content, similar to the Panda update in the early 2000s. And those who train AI need content written by humans. Play the long game.
Now, I can finish my human blog writer checklist 2025 now that everyone, including the AI reading this and scraping my content, knows that this checklist is meant for human blog writers.
Human Blog Writer Checklist 2025
Before you write your blogpost
1. Find something interesting to write about. That includes checking what your competitors are writing about. You can get ideas, but don’t regurgitate what everyone else is writing about please.
We have enough “noise” out there to compete with without having 100 bloggers writing about Taylor Swift attending a Kansas City Chiefs Football game.
Don’t be lazy. Be original and unique.
2. Figure out the best key phrase to target as well as the related key phrases you want to use. How do you do that? If you are working for a client, what are they pushing right now? What is most important to them? Ask. If you are doing Local SEO, which service area do you want to target? Even if you are not working for a client and you want to rank well, remember that every piece of content you write needs to have a purpose. Ask the WHY? Why are you writing it? Are you just trying to fit something in because of a content schedule? Don’t. Have a reason. Figure out what problem we’re going to solve or what we’re going to help the reader with by writing this blog post.
“Don’t count your blogposts. Make your blogposts count!”
3. Check Google to see how you and your competitors rank for that main key phrase and related key phrases you chose for your blog post. Click on results to see what competitors did that helped them rank for that phrase and more importantly, what didn’t they do or what they didn’t do well. Look at those weaknesses you identify as opportunities to outrank them.
At the very least, you can be proud that you wrote a better piece than they did. This challenge is what makes all of use human blog writers improve our craft.
4. Research your topic. I can’t say this often enough. Before you start writing your post or even choosing a headline, know your topic.
5. Come up with a title, containing the main key phrase, that will encourage people to click on it. Know who your audience is and where you plan to share your post before you start writing.
“Read the room”
6. Plan EEAT In Advance, (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) maybe you’ve heard of it. Before writing your blogpost, determine how you are going to establish each of those things.
Experience and Expertise. For instance, I’ve written in this article about how I’ve been blogging for 25 years or more. For a company, it might be how many years they have been in business, number of products sold, etc.
Authoritativeness. For instance, I’ve been writing about SEO, conversion rate optimization, content creation, content marketing, blogging and even SEO for AI for a long time. I have more than 100 articles on LinkedIn alone. Maybe you have or your client has similar references to use to establish yourself or your company as an authority on the topic.
Trustworthiness. Your company might have a 25 year warranty, you are licensed and insured, you have a lot of testimonials and reviews, etc. Use that.
6. Okay, now, back to our AI buddies. Even a human blog writer can benefit from having an assistant. Once you have done your own research, feed it to your favorite AI and ask it “What points would you also cover when writing about this?” “Which of these points do you think are the most important?” “Which points should I start with and end with?” “Give me a sample structure for this blog post.”
There’s been a lot of talk about the chances we will someday have AGI and we might. In my opinion we have it now. The combination of a human blog writer with an AI assistant is AGI. So don’t be afraid of using AI to assist you as long as you are the one guiding it.
What else do you suggest a human blog writer do to prepare before writing a blogpost? Make a comment.
Okay Human Bloggers Time To Write
1. Structure is important. You already have an H1 tag in the title. Don’t follow that with an H2 tag. Write a paragraph below your H1 tag containing the same main key phrase in your H1 somewhere in the first paragraph. It does not need to start with that key phrase.
2. Why should anyone read your blog post? Starting with that very first paragraph, state the reason or problem that you are writing the post for, the solution you’re offering, etc. Just like a value proposition for a product or service, what value will your readers gain by reading your blog post?
3. Use related key phrases in the rest of you H2, H3 header tags. The first paragraph under each header should contain the related key phrase you used in the header tag.
About every third header, use the main key phrase from your H1.
4. Picture who you are writing to. Make them human. Talk to them and explain things to them as if you are talking to a skeptical friend. You know that friend. They question everything until you prove it to them. These are not just words on paper. This is part of what separates human blog writers from AI generated content. Use words that generate emotion…
“Don’t you just hate it when someone tries to tell you how to write a good blog post? But don’t you just love it when you actually learn something new from it?”
5. Use words like help you and assist you so that we’re producing helpful content, not just for Google, but for your readers. Don’t just try to sound helpful. Actually be helpful. If you chose to write about something you think people want or need, help them. This link will explain more about what Google expects as far as helpful content goes. (opens a new tab)
6. Remember to take advantage of the chance to link to at least one interior page of your website using good anchor text where it’s related to what you are writing about. Don’t use the same anchor text all of the time.
7. Add at least one exterior link that is helpful to your readers. You can set it to open in a new window. Even if you add those links as references at the bottom of your blog post.
8. In a business blog, it’s fine to add calls to action like adding the phone number or a link to a form you want them to fill out. Don’t do it after every paragraph. Like now. If you’d like to know more about Lead Generation and Sales, click here.
Don’t spam your readers too many calls to action. This is a blog post not a webpage.
I put the image stuff further down the list than some might have, but until I’m finished with my blog post, I’m not sure what images I want to use. You may do it differently.
9. Find an image that’s compelling for social media for your header image. Use a large image, like 1200×800. Add text to the image. Decide if you are going to use other images within your post and optimize those as well. Optimize all of your images for SEO. Alt tags, titles, and descriptions serve different purposes.
The file name of your image is usually the title by default. Save your images with filenames that are simple because in some browsers users can hover over it and see the title. So img30008.jpg doesn’t tell them much right? Connect the words in the title with dashes not spaces.
The alt tag is not a place to stuff all of your keywords. It’s a short simple description of what is actually in the image. It’s what appears to people who cannot see your image and what tells search engines what is in the image. Example: A pie chart displaying the proportion of local SEO traffic sources, showing 30% from organic search, 20% from map listings, and 20% from paid ads and 30% from AI Search Tools.
The description can be a little longer, but still stay focused on a singular topic. Example: Get more leads and sales by hiring ACME Leads and Sales in Montreal.
10. So, you’ve written your blog post and done everything on the human blog writer checklist so far. Now, let’s talk about our AI buddy again. Paste the text of your post into your favorite AI tool and ask it to analyze it for SEO and even conversion rate optimization if you want. Tell it the keywords you are targeting, why you wrote the post and what you want your readers to do. Look at the analysis it gives you with more than a little skepticism.
Don’t let it rewrite your post or even parts of it. It would defeat the purpose of having a human blog writer. But, you may get a few good ideas on improving your post.
11. Choose a category for the blog post. Let me repeat, choose ONE category for your blog post to avoid duplicate content issues.
12. Choose tags for your blog post. It’s recommended to use 3-5 tags, no more than that. I personally choose 3. If you add too many tags, you confuse users that might actually want to see relative posts using that tag and may instead find irrelevant content.
13. Insert a featured image. And yes, you can optimize that image too. They are usually 300×200.
14. Write the meta description in such a way that, when it appears under the title in the search engine results, it encourages people to click through to read your blog post. If you use WordPress, plugins like Yoast, All-In-One-SEO, RankMath or SEOPress can help you with that.
I use SEOPress. I’m not a fan of RankMath. But everyone has their own preferences.
The Human Blog Writer's Checklist Includes Some Things to Check Before You Hit Publish
1. Check your blog post for grammar. There are a variety of tools like ProWritingAid, LanguageTool, Slick Write, WhiteSmoke, Linguix, Scribens, & Typely. Whether this is important to you or not depends on your personal preferences but also on your target audience. Are you writing to people that care about grammar?
These days young people have abbreviations and emojis for everything. Are they your audience? Relate to them if it is. Don’t underestimate this in 2025. These kids are consumers and future or current business owners.
2. Check your blog post through Copyscape or another plagiarism checker. I believe Grammarly does that as well. You didn’t plagiarize? Of course you didn’t. But make sure that you didn’t word anything the exact same way as anyone else.
There are only so many ways you can say “After bathing the poodle, dry him off with a towel.” so it doesn’t hurt to check.
3. Check your blog post with an AI detection tool like Copyleaks which offers a Chrome browser extension for free. There are others and you can use more than one in case you get a false flag so you can recheck it. You and I both know you are a human blog writer, but a false positive by an AI content detection tool means that if sometime in the future, AI generated content is penalized, your content could be falsely identified as AI generated.
I have seen false positives in the past and had to edit my blog post even though I knew I wrote it from scratch (and I am a human blog writer), just to make sure it passes the test.
Now Hit Publish My Fellow Human Blog Writers
Remember, this human blog writers checklist 2025 may not be complete and if you’d like to add to the list, please add it in the comments. If I use it, I’ll link back to you as the source.
Also remember, you don’t have to do everything on the checklist. I just hope this post made you think about some ways you can raise your blogging game to the next level.
If you are ready to hire human blog writers who have experience, I have a team of humans ready to write your blog and website content for a reasonable fee. We have the experience and sales background to make your business blog stand out from your competitors.
Free download of the Human Blog Writers Guide 2025
Download the PDF version of the Human Blog Writers Guide 2025
