Free blog outline generator for a stronger first draft.

Cogwheel Cycles is a two mechanic shop in a market town that has started selling electric bikes and wants a post that fills workshop slots. The inputs are a topic, how often an electric bike needs servicing, an audience, people who bought their first one in the last twelve months, and an action, a booked service. That is enough to outline from, and it is worth noticing how little of it is keyword research.

H1: How often does an e-bike need servicing? Opening section, 90 words: every six months or every 500 to 800 km, whichever comes first, plus an early check at around 200 km while cables stretch and spokes settle. H2, 180 words: what that 200 km first check actually covers, cable tension, spoke tension, the torque on the motor mounting bolts, and the firmware version. H2, 250 words: the three parts that wear faster on an electric bike than on a pedal one, chain, rear tyre and brake pads, with the reason for each. H2, 220 words: what you can check yourself between services, tyre pressure, pad depth, chain stretch and the charge level a battery should be stored at. H2, 150 words: the noises that mean stop riding today. H2, 140 words: what a service costs here and how long the bike stays with us. Close, 60 words: book a slot, or read the piece on storing a battery over winter.

What holds this up is the order. The H1 is the question in the words the reader would use, the answer arrives before any background, and every H2 after it is the question that reader genuinely raises next, in sequence, ending on the two things that decide whether they book: whether it is urgent, and what it costs. The word counts are assigned in advance, so the section that carries the real value gets 250 words and the introduction cannot quietly grow into 400.

The version most people would have written looks like this: Introduction. What is an e-bike. Benefits of electric bikes. Maintenance tips. Conclusion. It is five headings, it covers the subject, and it is much worse.

It is worse for reasons you can name one at a time. Someone searching for a service interval already owns the bike, so a definition section and a benefits section are selling them something they have bought. Maintenance tips is a bucket rather than a question, so it fills with generic advice that has no stopping point and no way to decide what belongs in it. With no word counts, the introduction expands and the only section anyone wanted stays thin. Conclusion is not an action, so the call to action gets bolted on at the end and reads like it. Worst of all, every one of those five headings could appear on any article about electric bikes, which means the skim path tells a scanning reader nothing about whether this particular page will answer them.

Skip the outline when you have not yet decided whether the piece should be a blog post at all. A large share of drafts that stall are service pages wearing a blog title. If the page exists to explain what you do, who you do it for and what it costs, that is a service page with its own URL and its own conversion job, and outlining it as an article produces something that sells to nobody. Decide the page type first, then outline.

Skip it when the topic is already covered on your site. The instinct to outline a new piece is strong, but two thin pages competing for the same question is worse than one good page. Open the existing post, work out which of the reader's questions it fails to answer, and outline the additions instead. An update plan is a different artefact from a fresh outline, and usually the more valuable one.

Skip it when the value of the piece depends on information you do not have yet. If the whole point of the article is what your fitters found across a season of callouts, or what your clients actually ask in month one, the outline cannot be written before the reporting. Outlining first in that situation quietly turns the piece into what you already knew, which is exactly the generic article you were trying not to write. Do the gathering, then outline around what you found.

And skip it for short posts that are announcements. A hiring note, a change of opening hours, a new location going live: these are 150 words with a clear fact in the first line. Putting an outline in front of them adds structure that the piece then has to fill, and a padded announcement is more annoying to read than a bare one.

An outline without numbers against each heading is a list of intentions. The counts are what make it a plan, because they force you to decide, while it is still cheap, which section carries the value. A 1,400 word post might be a 90 word answer, three sections of 200 to 300 words, one short section of 150 and a 60 word close. Writing those figures down means the introduction cannot expand into a warm up, and the section you were least sure about cannot be quietly dropped because you ran out of energy at heading four.

The counts also tell you when the outline is wrong. If a section needs 600 words to answer properly, it is not a section, it is the article, and the piece you were outlining is broader than it should be. If a section can only be filled to 80 words, you do not have a question there, you have a sentence that belongs in a neighbouring section. Both are much cheaper to notice in an outline than in a draft you have already spent an afternoon on.

The test that matters is not whether the outline covers the topic. It is whether someone who reads only the headings and the first section leaves with what they came for. Search readers scan the headings, decide in a second or two whether the page is for them, and read one or two sections rather than the whole thing. An outline built for that behaviour front loads the answer and writes headings that state a conclusion rather than name a topic.

There is a second reader worth outlining for, which is whoever has to approve or fact check the piece. A specialist can look at a headings list and tell you in a minute that the ordering is wrong, that you have missed the caveat that makes half the advice unsafe, or that the section you allocated 250 words to is really a paragraph. They cannot do that usefully with a finished draft, because by then the corrections read as a rewrite and everyone gets defensive. Circulating the outline rather than the draft is the cheapest quality step available.

A table of contents is a navigational summary of a piece that already exists. An outline is a decision document for a piece that does not, and the difference shows in what each one contains: a contents list has headings and nothing else, while an outline carries the intended word counts, the evidence each section will use, the question each heading answers and the action at the end. If your outline could be pasted straight in as a contents block, it is not doing the work.

A content brief is wider again. It usually carries the target query and its variants, the intent reading, the competing pages worth beating, the internal links to include, the author and the deadline, with the outline sitting inside it as one section. Confusing the two causes real problems: writers handed a brief with no outline invent their own structure, and writers handed an outline with no brief produce something well shaped that misses the point of commissioning it. If you only have time to make one properly, make the outline, and put the query and the action in a line above it.

When the outline is done, go through it once more with a single question against each heading: what specifically will fill this. Not what topic, but the actual example, figure, screenshot, quotation or set of steps you will put there. Any section that answers with a shrug is a section you are planning to pad, and it is faster to cut it now than to write 200 words of connective tissue later and then have to defend them.

Keep the outline visible while you draft and treat it as a contract with limited amendments. Drafting pulls you sideways, usually into the section you find most interesting, and the outline is what tells you that you have written 700 words into a 250 word slot. When you do want to change it, change the outline first rather than letting the draft drift, so the word counts and the ordering stay honest. Once the piece is published, keep the outline: it is the fastest possible starting point for the update six months from now, because it records not just what you covered but what you deliberately chose to leave out.