Creating a blog post is the perfect opportunity to highlight your offers, share your expertise and build a community of readers interested in your business. Blogging can be a fun and creative outlet to express yourself, and when done well is a great way to establish authority and share your knowledge! However, writing a blog shouldn’t have to take your hours. This post will give you six tips and strategies to help you write your next blog post efficiently and effectively.
To conduct proper keyword research, it’s essential to understand what keyword research is! Keyword research is a practice used to find relevant words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry. Keyword research will help give you insight into the types of content that people are searching for and want more info about. The “key” to a good keyword is to recognize phrases relevant to you and your business but don’t have steep competition. The ultimate goal is to incorporate popular keywords into your blog post to help increase traffic to your website.
Once you’ve completed your keyword research, you should ensure that they are incorporated throughout your blog, including:
Title tag
Headers
Body copy
URL
Meta description
If your blog writing goal is to drive organic traffic to your website, then keyword research is vital. If the purpose of your blog is simply to share resources with your current audience (like linking a blog post to your newsletter), then keyword research won’t matter as much.
But here’s the thing…if you’re spending your time writing a blog post, wouldn’t you want to do both simultaneously? Increase organic website traffic AND provide valuable resources to your current audience? Keyword research is a value-add that’s hard to argue against!
Understanding your target audience is a vital piece of writing a killer blog. Ask yourself:
What are their desires?
What are their pain points?
What do they need help with?
What do you know that could help them and their business?
As you write your blog, imagine you are speaking directly to your ideal client. Keep it conversational, add personality and consider who you’re writing for. Think about what is important to them, their values, and how their psychographics impact their buying decisions. Knowing your audience will help to form a deeper connection, and opportunities are created when readers get to like, know, and trust you!
Once you have an idea for your blog, create a clear outline before you start writing. Create bullet points outlining the main topics you want to cover. It’s super helpful to create sections with subtopics so you understand how to organize your blog before you start writing.
Use the sections and subtopics as your base and guide for writing the rest of your blog. Once you have your main points determined, expand upon each of them. Write down all of the thoughts you need to share for each. Continue this process for each bullet point. Before you know it, you’ll have nearly your entire blog written!
The keyword research you conduct before writing your blog will show you which keywords to include in your section headers. Creating different sections within your blog will also help your readers quickly find the information they are looking for. Not many people read every word of blogs these days, so making your content easy to skim is important.
Using keywords in your section headers (or H2 fonts) will also help the blog be more readable for Google and will overall help with SEO. Many SEO best practices also support your readers’ needs, as we covered earlier in this post. Two birds, one stone!
A call to action lets the reader know what you’d like them to do next after reading your blog. It should be simple and make it very clear what the reader could do next. Some options for a great CTA could be to check out your services page, join your newsletter, download a resource, follow you on social media or direct them to read a different blog that you’ve written.
We love using editing resources like Grammarly to help review the content we write to pinpoint run-on sentences quickly or misspelled words. Grammarly will save time, so you don’t have to proofread multiple times to find your mistakes! We love breaking writing rules sometimes–APA rules don’t always let your personality shine through. With that being said, try not to break too many rules at once. If your content gets hard to read or has too many unconventional mistakes, you will lose some credibility. Have fun with your copy, but be smart with which rules you decide to break!
Writing blogs for your website is a great way to show up on search engines and will help increase organic traffic to your website. Adding new content to your site will help show Google that you are active and keep visitors coming. Showcasing blogs on your website will also showcase your expertise. If time isn’t on your side for writing a blog, you can consider content repurposing! Expanding on a social media post or reworking your newsletter content are great ways to produce blogs in a shorter time. Get more details on how to efficiently plan out blogs (and other content) here.
If you want to grow your blog, we’re here to help! Whether it’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly content, we support product and service-based businesses showcase their expertise and increase organic traffic to their websites.