A daily conversation we have with many of our clients is the importance of writing a blog. There are many benefits of including this discipline into your marketing mix but its still one area that we know small businesses struggle with.
Your Tips for Success
Here are some tips we hope will help you to make your blog writing enjoyable and successful.
- The first most important point is to always write for your audience. This is actually really easy.. on a daily basis you will be interacting with your clients and answering questions that they have about your business. Well write about it – we get asked all the time about blogs so guess what we’re blogging about it!
- Can tell a story? Stories are the most powerful way to get a message across as they resonate with every human being and are the best way to connect an emotion to your article, remember its emotion that creates attention
- Another thing you can do to find out what users are searching online is to type a keyword into Google and scroll right to the bottom of the page, you will find a list of related searches here…. these can often prove useful for titles of your blog.
- Consistency, this is the killer one. Pick a frequency for posting and stick to it like glue. Seriously, this is where every business owner goes wrong.. they start with a belly full of enthusiasm and then all too soon it withers, or something more important crops up. Have a posting schedule, once a week is great!
- To help with consistency get yourself a content calendar. Spend a morning and plan the next few months blog post titles. You’ll be amazed then at how easy it is to collect the content once you know what you are writing about.
- Length of blog posts can vary, but try as a minimum to write at least 300 words. If your posts are very long visitors may not read the whole lot so think about breaking the words up with bullets or bold text. Of course if your piece is very long you could think about splitting it into a series for your reader.
- Spice up your blog with images and videos, it is so worth investing in getting some of your own images created as it gives a real personality to your blog. One of our favourite blogs that we read is from one of our clients Make Yourself, who write stories to full effect and always have a handcrafted image to accompany the post… this one here about presentation nerves is just fabulous and demonstrates the true value of storytelling and striking images.
- People are typically very short on time so your second headline really needs to sell a promise If the visitors keeps reading what are they going to get out of it, what is the benefit to them?
- Make everything you have posted easy to share, if you’ve spent time creating a masterpiece you want people to read and share it.
Most importantly have fun with it… blogs are a ‘friendly’ alternative to a serious news article, so pepper them with your personality and just get started – that content ball will soon start rolling!
Great post Karen, really helpful and inspiring. And thanks for the mention – praise indeed!