With five million blogs published every day, how can you write a blog that will get noticed and help you to grow your business? Here are five tips to get you started.
1. Know your audience
So many people start a blog by thinking about what they would like their customers to know about them or their business, when this is completely the wrong way to go about things.
People won’t take time out of their busy day to read about what you want to tell them. They will take time out to read about how you can help them solve the ‘pain points’ keeping them awake at night.
Research is critical to success. Don’t try to guess what prospects wants to hear about. Do take a moment to ask some of your existing clients in similar sectors, what challenges they want to overcome at the moment, what issues they need help with and what goals they want to achieve.
2. Make it topical
So, you know what issues your customers and prospects are struggling with and you’ve thought of some good things to say to help them with that. So what? Why now? What makes today the day to be talking about this?
If you can link what you have to say to the news agenda and what people are taking about right now, by opening your blog with a reference to a powerful statistic, press article or recent event linked to the topic, you will dramatically increase the number of people who stop and take the time to read your thoughts.
Taking a moment to make your topic seem new and noteworthy will make your blog stand out as being ‘of the moment and relevant’ and also increase your readers perception of you as a thought-leader who has their finger on the pulse.
3. Be an authority
Don’t be afraid to share your expertise and give away some of your insider knowledge. You’ve spent years perfecting your craft or area of expertise, so you needn’t be worried about giving away so much expertise that your customer can run off and do what you wanted them to pay you to do.
They might try, but by inspiring them to try and put your tips into practice they will at best get on okay, feel incredibly grateful and look forward to reading your next blog. Or, at worst, struggle a bit and ask you to help them further.
Either of these scenarios is a win-win, your blog should inspire people want to put your ideas into practice and make them want to stay connected with you, recommend your thinking to others and bear you in mind for any projects requiring your expertise.
4. Keep it concise
A good blog should be 650- 850 words maximum. It should be broken up with subheadings, every three paragraphs and have a concise heading that succinctly explains what taking the time to read your blog will reward them with.
The sentences should be short and sharp. Once you’ve written your first draft, highlight the body of your article, click, ‘tools’, then ‘wordcount’, and try to tighten up what you’ve written by at least 100 words.
Crop the sentences down and ‘rest’ your work, by going for a walk or doing something else, then re-read it to see which bits need strengthening and which bits can be cut out.
5. Have a killer heading
On average only 10% of the people who see your blog heading, typically via an email to share this with them, will bother to open the email. A professional writer can help you to triple or even quadruple that to 30-40% primarily through the use of a ‘killer headline’.
Killer headlines not only capture what the blog is about but do this in a way that makes people want to find out more. A good writer will spend as much time on constructing the heading and ‘promise’ of the blog as they do on the rest of the blog.
Good headings typically tell people how to do something you know they want help to do - eg, ‘How to…’ or ‘Five ways to succeed at…’ headings. Or they voice powerful opinion - eg, ‘Three reasons not to…’, or ‘Is it ever okay to…’ type constructs. Or they zoom in on the news agenda, eg - ‘The new law that promises to deliver X’.
Most of all, the secret to a good blog is to have something to say and say it well and just get started. The only way to get better is to get started and refine your approach depending on how the audience responds.
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