Blogging for Business Tips

Blog writing is not effective if it is not well presented. If the presentation of a blog post does not look good, fewer people (if any) will read your blog posts fully. Some may just ‘skim-read’, others may ONLY ‘glance’ and some just won’t even bother.

Presentation is key!

Also, if you feel you’re not a good writer, there are many ways to improve and overcome this. As mentioned earlier in this blog post, having a blogging coach helps. The good ones can provide MANY tips and methods to help you improve. Here are just a few tips:

• Ensure that your blog posts look attractive and are easy to read. Blog posts that are poorly designed and poorly formatted on the page are off-putting. Help people avoid getting tired eyes and/or bored. Include more visuals. Make your blog posts visually interesting. Also refer back to everything else I spoke about in the ‘publishing’ section of this blog posts, including font sizes.
• Start writing short 300 word blog posts to begin with. Get good at this FIRST. Focus on writing useful and interesting 300 word blog posts, before trying to tackle longer ones. Start with the training wheels on and get confident writing ‘short’ before starting to write ‘long’. After all: a long poorly written blog post won’t get read.
• Learn about ‘word value’. It’s harder to convey something in fewer words, than many words, BUT people remember short punchy sentences and paragraph WAY more so than waffle.

Here are some more tips

• Think of someone specific and write your blog post(s) to that person. Ensure that person is a good representative of the audience you wish to write to. We’re all used to writing emails. If you write blog posts similar to the way you write an email, this helps gets the ideas out of your head and onto the page. You can then add sub-heading and restructure the blog post to make it very scan readable. If you do this for long enough, you’ll start seeing dramatic improvements in your blog writing abilities.
• Write the way you speak. Forgot about all the ‘sentence structure’ stuff they taught us in primary school and high school. People don’t speak like that. To engage people, you need to write in a conversational and interesting manner. Write for people to enjoy, not to get a good grade with your high school English teacher. 
• Quality not quantity. Each blog post is a reflection of your business. If each of  your blog posts are useful, informative, etc, that is a BIG tick for your business. Don’t add blog posts for the sake of adding them.
• Don’t treat it as chore. Instead, do it because you want to share your knowledge and help others. After all, this is why the internet was invented; to share useful content with others. 
• Before publishing a blog post, read it on your mobile phone. Not only is this a good way to check for typos, it is a GREAT way to make sure your words flow well; that each sentence sounds good; that it flows logically and paragraphs are not too long.
• Struggling to think of topic ideas: You can use tools like those mentioned in this blog post. Or just ask yourself: “What are the major questions the bulk of your customers ask?” and/or “What would they want to know?” And if you really want to make an impression, come up with topics that they may not even consider, but they really should know about. Or contact a ‘blogging for business expert’. I can easily come up with 50 or more blog topics for ANY business very quickly.
• Find a good Proofreader. Try and reduce the amount of typos in your blog posts as much as possible. No typos or spelling errors is best. Alaos ask your proofreader to provide general feedback; especially if they have editorial skills.
• A good content Editor is also worthwhile. They can help you refine your blog posts.

Remember the saying: “Rome was not built in a day.” One blog post does not always flow out of you in one sitting/writing session. Sometimes you need to do some research, write a draft, save it as ‘draft’, review it, modify it, do some more research, give your brain time to think about it, find credible sources of information to link to, get feedback, etc.

Give yourself permission to work on a blog post over a period of days. One or two hours here and there and you’ll have a GREAT quality blog post written before you know it!

Please also note:

• It is a good idea to look at your Google Analytics (GA) data each month. It’s a great feeling when you can see that REAL people are actually reading your blog posts. It’s also encouraging. If you don’t know how to read the GA data, ask an expert to help you (and/or teach you).
• If you’re time-poor and/or not in front of a computer often: Audio record your blog posts to your phone. Record parts of your blog post as they come to you. Then use a service like rev.com to transcribe your audio recordings to text. All you then need to do is assemble the transcribed words into a flowing blog post.
• Look at your Google Analytics data to see how many visitors each of your blog posts bring to your website, which blog posts are the most popular, etc.