If you’re not a writer, writing blog posts can be intimidating. You know that blog posts will help your SEO. You know that content marketing is important. You know that when Escalate Social Marketing is driving traffic to your website, you’ll need your own Evergreen Content sooner or later.
You have a lot of knowledge you can share with the world. You can always hire us (or someone else) to write blog posts for you, but if you prefer to do it yourself or don’t yet have the budget to hire it out, where do you start in writing your knowledge down?
Choose the topic for your blog posts
Think about your products or services — what is the main thing you’re selling or sharing? Is it shoes? Flooring? A restaurant? Software? Cleaning services? Write this down on a piece of paper.
Now think about your customers — what kinds of things are they interested in? What do they want to know? Let’s take, for instance, cleaning services. Your customers might be interested in cleaning products, tips for quick tidying up, or what they need to know before hiring a cleaning service.
For more ideas, you can type “cleaning services” into Answer The Public’s free search tool for generating popular questions related to your topic. Create a list or a mind map of 5-10 topics. You can even use Facebook crowdsourcing or ask your clients for ideas for your blog posts.
Choose a title for your blog post
Once you’ve chosen a topic, choose the title for your blog post. Don’t get hung up on SEO here, but do consider it. Uber Suggest and Keyword Tool are two excellent free resources for this.
Type your main topic into one or both of the keyword tools linked above. In this case, it’s “cleaning services.” Scan the list of suggested keywords to see if any relate to the topics you listed in the first step. If nothing jumps out at you, then look at the topic you’ve chosen to work on and type one or two of the keywords into the tools.
For this example, let’s use “cleaning products.” Look at the keywords and choose one. If you want to be fancy, choose one that’s not too hard to rank for — UberSuggest does a great job of showing you this. In this case, let’s choose the phrase “cleaning products pregnancy.”
Next, type that into Google and scroll down to where there are questions and articles. For this example, you decide the title that works best is “Is It Safe to Use Cleaning Products During Pregnancy?” Perfect. Now you know what the blog post is about.
Gather Information for your blog post
There is already a ton of information on the web about your topic — I can almost guarantee it. Google it and look at at least 5 articles. Remember that copyright laws mean you can’t just copy and paste from these articles, but you can take notes from the articles. Plan to link these articles from your blog post.
Organize your notes into two or three subtopics. In this case, perhaps it will be “dangers of cleaning products during pregnancy,” “tips for cleaning during pregnancy,” and “how to minimize your use of cleaning products during pregnancy.” These will be the headings in your blog post. Hooray! You’re ready to write!
The winning formula for blog posts
- Write an introduction. Ideally, include the keywords you’ve chosen in your first sentence. This introduction can be short and simple — an overview of your topic that consists of at least three sentences, but no more than three paragraphs. If you can, link to any other articles in your blog that are relevant, or to the articles you read to gather information.
- Write your headline for the first section, such as “Dangers of Cleaning Products During Pregnancy.” Again, this doesn’t have to be long — 3-5 sentences will be enough, and include some links again if it’s relevant. Repeat this for the remaining headlines.
- Remember to link to your own products and services. In this case, in the section “How to Minimize Your Use of Cleaning Products During Your Pregnancy,” you should include a tip to “Hire a cleaning service such as [our amazing cleaning service]” with a link to your services.
- Write a conclusion with the heading “Conclusion.” Again, three to five sentences will do.
- Choose a photo — one you’ve taken, or one you have the rights to use. Make this your primary blog image and put it at the top of the page. If you need to change the size of the image, you can do that for free in Canva.com.
Publish your blog post and share it
That’s it! You’re ready! Read the post one more time to check for spelling and any typos or any other mistakes, and publish it. Share it on your Facebook or Twitter page, ask your customers to share it, include it in your newsletter, and share it anywhere else you find your customers! That wasn’t so bad, was it?
Comments
If you’ve found this post helpful, we’d love to read your comments — or for you to link the blog posts you write using this advice. Happy blogging!
