10 Blogging Tips
Content, content, Google is always crawling for great new content. We have scoured our archives for the best 10 blogging tips for awesome engagement. Each year there are new ideas to capture attention, so we have curated our best blogging tips guaranteed to help your business attract attention and engagement.
Before we talk about our best 10 blogging tips, how do you set up a blog in the first place? If you have a company website, it’s easy to add a “Blog” as a menu item on your website. A “blog” is such a common term, everyone knows this is where you are going to write and update content on topics your audience cares about. If you don’t have a website, then you can use platforms such as Medium or Blogspot to create content to express your ideas. These platforms are more useful and effective for individuals rather than companies, but a good way to test if your topic is interesting to readers.
1. Know Your Audience
Keep a customer avatar in front of you at all times before you even think about blogging. What is the makeup of your audience? Businesses tend to think they sell their products to everyone, but in reality, only 20% of their customers buy 80% of their products. So what does your 20% customer base look like?
For example, corporations like Nike have great statistics on who their customers are and what products they buy. They can spin their articles and stories multiple ways to attract their audience for top products.
A great way is to create a vision board of your audience. If your audience is made up of children, pictures of children of all ages, ethnicity, happy, sad on your vision board will inspire you to write. These pictures will be a gold mine for you to create amazing blogging material.
Things to consider:
Age/Gender/Interests/personality/pain points
2. Follow An Outline
Put together a blogging schedule and make an outline for each blog. Every blog should have a specific pain point it addresses. The way you address your topic depends on the mood you want to create. Is it through humour, serious tone, facts, happy, emotional. Don’t be afraid to disrupt or use different tones to get your message across.
A very creative way to get out the message of the cancer awareness campaign “stand up to cancer” was a v-log (more about that later) carpool karaoke with James Corden and singer Michael Buble. This YouTube video combined humour and the heartfelt storyline of Michael Buble’s young son’s battle with cancer.
3. Come Up With A Catchy Headline
What makes up a catchy headline? The use of common, uncommon, emotional and powerful words in the right balance.
The ideal headline is 55 characters long to show up in the google search as a complete sentence. Any longer, a section of your complete headline won’t show up. It’s very important to use these 55 characters effectively when you are blogging. We all skim headlines, so we are likely to read the first three and last three words of a headline. Keep that in mind when you are dreaming up your blogging title.
4. Be Passionate About Your Topic
If your blogging topic is “Health and Wellness”, there are a million ways to write about this topic depending on whether you are a holistic health practitioner, a chiropractor, a nutritionist, a pharmaceutical company, a food blogger, a doctor or a counselor. A google search of “health and wellness” brings up 550 million searches. Everyone it seems wants to know about health and wellness so there is no end of topics that could include those keywords.
5. Write A Captivating Intro
Include your keywords in the first sentence. We’ll help you with keywords when we talk about optimizing your blogging for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Your first paragraph has to draw in your audience to want to learn more about your topic.
6. Don’t Worry About The Length Of Your Blog
Much has been written about the ultimate length of your blog, but at a minimum look at 300 words. Between 300 and 900 is the optimum. Don’t bore your readers to death and don’t use too much industry jargon that could confuse your readers. Remember at all times you are writing for your audience, what do they want to learn that you are passionate about. Write to inform and then include links to other articles that you have written that are related to this subject. Entrepreneur and Forbes always insert “Related Articles” into their blogs, to capture more attention to the subject.
7. Insert Good Visuals Relevant To Your Topic
Visuals can be photos you have taken as long as they are in focus and of high quality or photos you have purchased through a professional image site such as Getty. DO NOT use Google images unless you do an advanced search for Google images that have a CC (Creative Commons license) that allows you to use the image for free. There are sites such as Unsplash that have a selection of free images, but it’s important to check how the free pictures can be used.
If you can find a short (1 minute and under) video on YouTube to illustrate your blog that counts as a great visual. And YouTube is one of the best channels to find what could be the perfect video for you. If using someone else’s video don’t forget to give them the credit for the video. It is better to use your own video because it keeps your visitors on your brand channel.
We touched on a V-log. A V-log is basically a blog that you put together in video form and post to your YouTube channel. All the same principles for blogging apply to V-log, except keep your video short, under 2 minutes, to keep the attention of your audience. Social media is paying a lot of attention to videos this year. A V-log is a great way to tap into this trend.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkuXX6dY-7k[/embedyt]
8. Optimize Your Page For SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The most important top 10 blogging tips for awesome engagement is SEO optimization. Remember the first three and last three words in your blog title? These are considered keywords or key phrases that people would search. If YOU were searching for a topic, what key phrases and words would you key into google search? Include all these in your tags. Marketing guru, Neil Patel has come up with a great tool for analyzing keywords. You can see how your own keywords are ranking or how your competitors’ keywords are ranking. His site Ubersuggest is worth checking out. Neil has written a blog to help you get the most out of Ubersuggest.
All of your pictures should have Alt Titles that contain the keywords of your blog.
Your sentence structure should be easy to read (read short sentences with transition words). If you have a WordPress website a great SEO tool is a free plugin called Yoast. This plugin helps you optimize our blog for SEO both your written material as well as your keyword and meta descriptions.
There is another free and amazing WordPress plugin for SEO called Rank Math and personally I think this plugin is even better than the free version of Yoast, because you can plug in more keywords for SEO ranking and get a better SEO score with this tool. I’m sure you will be impressed once you have checked out Rank Math,
9. Insert a CTA (Call To Action)
Don’t leave the crumbs on the table! You have your audience’s attention, they have read your blog, so don’t let them leave before you offer them something valuable.
What is valuable? This could be a variety of options. Your choice of an offer is your Call To Action. Here are a few:
- a) A free consultation
- b) A free ebook
- c) A special offer
- d) A free trial
- e) A link to your contact page
10. Proofread Your Post and Fix Formatting
Read and re-read your blog post a few times for grammar and spelling errors. A great app for checking for pesky errors is a free app called Grammarly. It’s truly a writer’s best friend! If you have composed your blog in Word and then copied it over to your website post page, check the formatting of the sentences and spacing before you publish.
Don’t be intimidated if you have not written a blog before. Grab a coffee, listen to some music to get you in the mood and find your best place for writing. For some that could be the quiet of your home, or office and for others it’s in the middle of the action in a shared workspace or your favorite coffee shop.
The more you write, the more you will want to write and before you know it you will have awesome engagement, and an audience who look forward to hearing from you. They have bookmarked your site and go back to it time and time again to see what you have to say. Or they may even have you on their website RSS feed so your material is always updated on their site. And the content length is important for SEO. Here is an infographic that explain the concept:
Blogging is an important part of branding your business. To read about 3 easy steps to branding your business, check out this blog
Content Length and Its 10 Factors Affecting SEO [Infographic] by the team at Capsicum Mediaworks, LLP
If you are a newbie to blogging and would like to take our blogging course, go to our sister website and sign up for your customized blogging session. We will tailor our course for your specific business. This is a 1 on 1 customized training to get you online and noticed.
Are you unsure of how to market your business online? Connect with us here to book a free half-hour consultation.