Why is a blog important for your business?
By adding a blog to your website, you are doing your readers a HUGE service by offering them relevant information on pertinent topics that are important to them. You also get the chance to tell your readers your story AND keep them in the know about new things your business has going on. A new blog post gives you great content to boost on your social media platforms and keeps you current and relevant within your community.
Aside from the service you’re offering your audience and the chance to tell your story, a blog page has huge SEO (search engine optimization) benefits for your website. Blogging helps keep your website up-to-date in search engine results; sites like Google and Yahoo get pinged to check out your new content so they can surface it in search results when people look for your business (or businesses like yours).
Now that you understand a few of the benefits of maintaining a blog, use our tips below to start creating blog posts that people will read, enjoy, and bring people back to your website for more!
Tip #1: Get inspired with a good topic.
Online Marketing expert Neil Patel lists some great places to get started. He uses BuzzSumo, which provides insights into the most popular online content and who’s sharing it, and good old-fashioned brainstorming (coupled with the aid of social media analytics, which can help you pinpoint the posts and topics your readers are interested in, as well as what they absolutely do not care about. At all.).
WE love drawing inspiration from HubSpot’s handy blog topic generator. You just fill in the fields with three nouns related to what you’d like to write about, and HubSpot will generate blog post titles in seconds! You may not always draw a winner, but you’ll usually at least get pointed in the right direction.
Tip #2: Don’t be afraid to do a little curating.
Marketing blogger Pamela Vaughan explains, “Not all of your content has to be 100% original.” Curated content collects resources from experts around the web and it offers valuable insight for your blog reader. Remember when you had to write reports in school? Nobody expected you to be a full-fledged expert on every topic you wrote about. You were expected to go to the experts, gather their knowledge, and present it in a concise manner. Apply that to your blog writing (just subtract those horrible index cards at the library and add easy Google/Google Scholar searches).
Tip #3: Start with an outline, move on to an introduction and conclusion, then add the meat.
Misspell words, jot down ideas that you might end up crossing off later, and go a little off the beaten path if you must. Just get your main idea down and your thought process going. Once you’ve developed a thorough, logical outline, don’t look at it for a day or two. When you come back, you’ll have a fresh perspective on your initial thoughts. As you begin writing, we recommend developing your introduction and conclusion paragraph first. This will help you reign in all your subsequent ideas to make sure they stay on the right track with your main point. As you do research on your topic, you can add substance to the body of your outline.
Tip #4: Let your voice shine through!
People will be more captivated by what you write if there’s some personality included. The Middle Finger Project has a great article with some examples of the difference between personality vs. no personality in writing. Bottom line? When you inject a personal touch into what you write, it’s more fun to read, more interesting and more likely to hold your readers’ attention.
Use these tips, start blogging and share your fabulously-written blog posts on our Facebook page to show off how you’re on-track and doing it right with your website’s blog posts!