A lot of clients we help know that they need blogs on their website, but don’t know where to start.
If you have been told you need a blog - whether it’s to engage your audience, enhance your search engine optimisation (SEO), or as another avenue of marketing content creation - it can seem like a big task.
Using our tips and tried and tested tricks, we can make the daunting writing process a little bit easier and set you up to win.
The actual writing part of the blog holds only half of the weight of success. The most important part of blog writing comes in deciding WHAT to write about.
The questions you need to be asking in the planning phase of blog writing are:
If you have an SEO strategist helping you, they will often take care of this part for you and tell you exactly what Google and your audience are looking for with keywords and what you need to do to hit your ranking goals.
But if you are writing for your own content purposes and don’t have a strategist working for you, make sure you take the time to do some research and plan for success!
Are you thinking that you might need an SEO strategist now? Talk to us today and we can help you find the best solution for your business with our team of content and marketing specialists.
Preparing your blog title and hook is everything! Even if you choose the right topic in planning, if you don’t communicate it in an engaging way to hook your audience, it won’t do much if they don’t click it. We can’t emphasise enough the importance of using a title that’s searchable and engaging that will lock your audience into reading more.
Your title is what makes them decide whether to click in the first place, and then the first few sentences helps them decide whether they will stick around until the end. Often, once they are past the first few points, they’ve invested enough that the ‘hook’ factor becomes less important and you can get on with informing, engaging and encouraging them to use your services or buy your products.
Stories and solutions are two really effective ways of getting people to read and engage with your information.
When we say use stories for blogs, that doesn’t mean ‘once upon a time’ and they definitely shouldn’t be fictional. When you use a story style of writing, you are sharing a journey you’ve gone on. It’s a great way to be personal and relatable, while keeping your readers going to find out what’s at the end. For example, a car salesman or mechanic may want to share with their audience about a new line of cars that have been launched. Instead of ‘what you need to know about the new car’ the topic could be ‘5 things we learned test driving the new car’, and then sharing the story of the test drive to deliver the information. This personal style of writing isn’t for everyone and can’t be used for every topic, but because of its relatable nature, it translates very well to other uses like social media.
Alternatively, giving your audience solutions to problems is another great way to write blogs. You start the blog describing a problem your reader might have and use that to launch into your information that solves that problem. If you need a sneaky example, you’ll see that we’ve done that here in this blog for you! We talked about how hard or daunting blog writing can be - and here we are giving you answers to make it easier.
There is nothing that readers hate more than being led down the garden path and not finding what they are looking for. For example, if you are writing about planting flowers in summer, don’t make your audience have to read for 100 words before even mentioning flowers. We have all been caught on clickbait articles that promise a great recipe or story that make scroll through people’s whole life story before getting to the point. If you hate it – your audience will too. Get to the point, and if you’re trying to pack in keywords for SEO purposes, think of other interesting ways to include it in the blog without boring your audience to disengagement.
You don’t NEED to be an expert to write a blog. The great part about the internet is that anyone can make content and be a blog writer. But if you can’t spell, hate the thought of sitting at a computer and writing, don’t have the time, or really want your written content to reflect the extremely high quality of your business – a writing expert like us can be a valuable asset.
Whether you want to outsource your blog completely, or just want some help editing and optimising your own writing, we are here to make you look awesome, online, offline and everywhere.
Contact us and speak with our friendly creative team to get a free quote today.
