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Thinking about starting a blog for your small business, but not sure where to start? Here are a few tips and steps you can use to create a blog your audience will actually want to read.
Why add a blog to your website?
There are many reasons to add a blog to your website, but the biggest reason is that it’s an affordable marketing tool with a long life span that guides your customers through the buying process.
What kind of blog should your business have?
When it comes to actually creating the blog, figuring out where to start can be overwhelming. Questions immediately start popping into my mind. Questions like, what topics do I talk about? Are there formats or styles I should be following? Will anyone actually read this?
To all these questions my first response is to think about what’s in it for your blog audience? Focusing on this will help you determine what to write about, and the blog format, and will bring readers to your post. So where do you start from here?
How to choose topics for your blog
Answer customer questions & concerns
A good starting point for choosing blog topics: answer your customer questions and concerns you’ve been approached with in the past.
If none are coming to mind, imagine being in your ideal customer's shoes. Then, ask yourself what they would want to know before buying your product or service.
When writing blogs in response to customer concerns and questions, content marketing experts recommend that you give a few different solutions to their problems. Don’t just discuss your products as a solution or answer. Instead, offer information on anything that might be helpful to them. This helps you build trust with your audience and establish your business as an authority in your niche.
Explore topics closely related to your products or services
Another way to determine what to write about is to have a handful of topics (2-3) that are relevant to your brand or products. For example, if you have a skincare company you might choose to focus on, skincare tips and self-care in your blog.
Focus on areas where you can offer high-quality, value-oriented blog posts
This helps you avoid writing “fluff” that you don’t want to write and that your audience won’t want to read. By focusing on the idea of delivering a blog post that’s actually interesting and informative, you’ll not only be delivering an amazing customer experience, but you’ll also be helping your website rank better on search engine result pages.
How do you actually write a blog post?
Now that we’ve established what you can write about on our blog, it’s time to explore the how of it.
There are a few steps you can take to help you streamline the blog writing process. These will not only help you write faster, but they’ll also help you write higher-quality blog posts.
Here are the steps I recommend (and that I follow myself!) for writing a blog post:
Step 1: Create an outline
Create a quick list of the key points you’d like in the blog post and organize them in a way that offers flow and understanding for your reader. This tells you where you might want to do research or if other points need to be added.
For this step, it can be helpful to plan on using a blog format to organize your points. Popular blog formats include:
Lists
How-Tos/Guides
Interviews/Q&As
Profiles
Personal Experiences
Trends/Newsworthy Pieces
Step 2: Write the main body
Be sure to use content writing best practices, and aim to have a word count of over 500.
Step 3: Write the introduction and conclusion
Now that you have your key points fleshed out, it’s much easier to write a relevant introduction and conclusion for the post.
Step 4: Write a strong blog post title
Give yourself a few options for your headline. Push yourself to come up with 10-15 different options before settling on one. Consider using a tool like Co-Schedule's Headline Analyzer to help you out in the process.
Step 5: Edit
Read through your piece to ensure it makes sense, is easy to follow, and of course to be sure it’s grammatically correct. I also like to use Grammarly’s free editing software to help me pick up on anything that I may have missed while reading through the text.
Step 6: Add in photos and graphics
Adding visual elements helps to break up the text and add to the quality of the blog. You can find free-to-use photos from websites like Unsplash or Pixabay. You can also create your own graphics with Canva if you want to create an infographic or create branded visuals.
Step 7: Final read-through
Now that you have all the visuals added and your text finalized, give everything one last read-through before publishing.
With these steps, you’ll be offering your audience amazing value and turning them into customers.
Looking for help with your blog?
Get in touch with me, and we can figure out a solution together.
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