App guide: blog post outline

Who can use this feature

Available on Team and Enterprise plans

The blog post outline app will help you create an outline for a blog post from a title or a subject. This guide will walk you through the app and give you tips for how to use it most effectively.

When to use this app

💡 Ideation
🧠 Brainstorming
🏗️ Structuring

Try using this app when you have a general idea for a blog post, and want some help coming up with ideas for the structure or for potential supporting sections. This app works best for brainstorming, so try to keep your inputs relatively high-level and not too specific.

Once you have an outline you like, you can generate an entire blog post from it with the blog post app.

Inputs

Input Field	Description	Required
Topic	What’s the title or subject of the article?	Yes
Purpose	What's the purpose of the article?	Yes
Number of paragraphs	Desired number of paragraphs	No

Output examples

Example #1

Topic: How to empower GTM teams for product-led growth

Purpose: Learn what it takes to assemble the right go-to-market team for executing on product-led growth.

Number of paragraphs: 6

How to empower GTM teams for product-led growth

1. Product-led growth teams should be organized around customer needs and problems, not product features.

2. Define what product-led growth is and why it's effective

3. Outline the different roles on a product-led growth team

4. Explain how to go about assembling a team for product-led

5. Give examples of companies that have been successful with product-led growth

6. Discuss the challenges and opportunities of product-led

Example #2

Topic: Improving your credit score in 6 months

Purpose: For people with low credit scores, show them what they can do to immediately impact their credit scores

Number of paragraphs: 7

Improving your credit score in 6 months

Start by disputing errors on your credit report

Pay your bills on time, every time

Pay any collections, charge-offs, or public records

Keep balances below 30% of your credit limit

Become an authorized user on someone else's credit card

Don't close unused credit cards

Avoid opening new credit accounts unnecessarily

Example #3

Topic: How to maintain an effective hybrid remote work culture

Purpose: To help HR managers set up a system and rules that make a hybrid remote workplace successful

Number of paragraphs: 5

How to maintain an effective hybrid remote work culture

1. Define what a hybrid remote workplace is and agree on a common definition within your company

2. Set up a system where employees can indicate their preferred work location

3. Foster communication and collaboration between employees who are in the office and those who are remote.

4. Encourage employees to take advantage of the flexibility of the hybrid remote workplace.

5. Evaluate the effectiveness of the hybrid remote workplace regularly and make adjustments as necessary.

Tips

Starting from scratch

You might be starting fresh from just a rough initial concept — like "Roadmap communication" — but even if your initial concept isn't fully fleshed out, don’t be shy about plugging it in! Writer can help generate ideas from very little. You can then use these ideas to narrow down what you’d like to write about.

In this example, we put in a high-level concept ("Improving roadmap communication") and got back several potential ideas for how to elaborate on this topic. We can continue to generate more drafts to get more and more new ideas.

Fleshing out ideas

If you have a more detailed topic and purpose in mind — like “Roadmap communication with internal stakeholders” — you can add these details to have Writer hone in on a particular angle.

In this example, we've dialed down the level of detail, but we’ve noted that the focus is on "internal stakeholder" roadmap communication. Here, Writer has given us some interesting ideas for what to discuss regarding internal stakeholder roadmap communication.

Building structure

With very detailed inputs, you will likely get fewer brand new ideas. However, the outline app can still help you decide how to structure your blog post.

In this example, we gave a fairly detailed input for the “Purpose” field. Hyper-specific detail can lead to less overall creativity from Writer. You’ll find that the outline generated will take a lot of cues from your provided topic and purpose, and might not branch out as much.

General tips

Tip #1: Too specific? Zoom out.

If you find that the outlines you're getting are too specific or don't contain interesting new ideas, try writing a more high-level description of your input.

Tip #2: Not specific enough? Add clarification.

If the outline is too vague, double check your references. For example, instead of writing “roadmap,” try “product roadmap,” so Writer knows exactly what topic and domain you’re writing about.

Tip #3: Try the blog post app

If you’ve already got an outline in mind, try skipping straight to the blog post app.

Tip #4: Don't be afraid to experiment

Experiment away! Writer will give you fresh ideas each time, so try out new inputs and don’t be afraid to click Generate content a few times to see what Writer thinks.

Tip #5: Revisit old drafts

Each draft you generate is always accessible in the drafts section at the bottom of the app. Just revisit that doc, open up an app, and scroll down to see your drafts.

Tip #6: Be aware of what Writer actually knows

Our generative AI model is trained on data available on the open web. If your blog topic is about something proprietary or extremely specific, then it might not be a good use case for using Writer. Check out this example below. We asked Writer to write about Writer’s software stack and architecture. The results are either very vague or they’re completely wrong! This is expected. Writer will have a tough time writing about something that it has no knowledge of.

Too vague:

Totally inaccurate: