So do you think blogging is all about blogging? You may be mistaken into thinking, you write, publish and are done! But no, there is so much to do before, during and after to get the most out of your blog publishing, read on to find out how.
The focus needs to be on your audience and reaching a new audience. As with our website the content needs to be there to help your consumer, not just for you to tick a box on your marketing list.
What to do BEFORE you publish a blog post
Blogging isn’t just about adding content to your website and pressing PUBLISH, it should be part of an overall strategy that ties in with your social media objectives.
So where to start?
What do you want to blog about? What is the topic? There are various ways to develop a list of blog topics, with the development of a blog strategy being an excellent start as mentioned above.
We want to develop a list of blogs ideas that will be of interest to your audience and interest possible new customers. looking at your competitor’s blogs and see what is trending on social media for you to add your opinion are additional ways to develop the topic listing.
When you have your topic, it is now time to start with your first task on distributing your content.
Yes, that is right – distribution starts even before you write your post. And long before you publish a blog post.
This is because SEO is one of the key points for blogging that you will need to consider to help create the right balance of keywords for your blog to be optimised.
A tool called Ubersuggest is a great way to do this. By adding your proposed keywords to this tool it will find associated words that your audience will type into Google to find your post.
You will want to locate words that have a real mix of search results from SEO searching. Often you will probably get better results for adding on Long-tail keywords (the idea that some keywords are actually short phrases of multiple words associated with your industry)
Research your post
The idea of blogging in my mind is to develop a blogging strategy which showcase your knowledge about your business and that you are an expert in your field. We all like to think we are experts in our own industry and will have opinions on new techniques and products coming into our markets, blogs are a great away to showcase this information and add your own twist and thoughts. So research into your top is a key factor to gather the info you can talk about.
As usual, the internet can be your friend on this, to search related articles, to get customer review information and make notes and save information to help you build your own blog content.
The structure of your blog is key, as people are busy they want to know from the get-go that is worthwhile them investing in your blog to get some value from it.
A good structure for a post is as follows:
HEADLINE
Introduction
-> SUBHEADLINE
-> Content
-> SUBHEADLINE
-> Introduction to subtopic
-> -> SUBSUBHEADLINE
-> -> Content
-> -> SUBSUBHEADLINE
-> -> Content
-> -> …
-> SUBHEADLINE
-> Content
-> …
-> FINAL WORDS
-> Closing Paragraph
Keep it simple and easy to read.
Write your post content
Now we have the structure nailed and the research has been done, we can get down to writing the blog itself. As we mentioned before we want to use blogs to educate and inform, so the language needs to fit this framework, no need for over complex sentences or use of jargon, it needs to be easy to read and engage your audience and of course, stick to the structure!
Once the blog has been written, go back through it and make sure it maintains the structure and that there is a punchiness to it, short paragraph, removal of unnecessary words etc.
Make sure your punctuation and spelling is good and use tools at your disposal like Grammarly (especially if you are wiring directly onto the back of your website, where spellcheckers never appear!)
Final thing before you post, make sure you add a Call to Action at the end of your blog. Make it easy for people to follow up with you.
Use Yoast to keyword optimize your post
If you have a WordPress site using the SEO plugin Yoast is a great friend to bloggers as it has a clear traffic light system to help guide you through your article to get the best readability and SEO results.
Follow the suggestions of Yoast until the traffic light system of Yoast shows that your post is now green.
Place internal links and external links in your post
One activity that should not be underestimated when creating new content is external AND internal linking. It’s very important for SEO that you add links before you publish a blog post. Yoast will tell you to add some of these links to your post, but there is no harm in adding more where appropriate.
Especially internal links are significant:
- They increase time on site for your readers as they click through to more content.
- They improve the SEO value of your existing posts.
I have added both references to my sources in this blog and to other blogs in my archives that have relevancy to this topic.
Find and/or create images
Try to create bespoke imagery for your blogs so they have good SEO value and connection to your brand. Using tools like Canva is a great way to do this.
It is always important that every image has the relevant titles and Alt Tags added to it so it remained connected to your blog and your business. Yoast will help you pick this up when you upload an image.
We can then revisit the headline (the title of your blog) before we go any further. Try to include your associated keywords into it and create something that has stand out! We want to people to see through the banality of other bloggers and come straight to your door
Your SEO traffic and social media traffic will massively improve when you go through this process every time before you publish a blog post
Now, publish that blog post! (after checking out how it previews, of course!)
Our next blog will look at the work you also need to do once your blog has been published!
For more information on blogging for your business, check out our recent blogs online. If we can help you develop a blog strategy for your business, please get in touch, contact us on 01642 712817 or email us at [email protected]
