You’ve been told it’s a good idea to create a blog for your business to drive traffic to your website and to help improve your SEO. Now what? That’s all well and good, but what on earth are you going to write about?
I have found that through blogging over the years I do have to step back and reassess every once in a while what I am blogging about to make sure it aligns with my ideal customers and helps them when they’re looking for services like mine.
What would your dream clients ask you?
Starting with the basics, make sure that your blog posts are written with your ideal customers in mind. Your blog posts should answer their questions, address their pain points and solve problems for them
The first thing to do is come up with a whole bunch of ideas for things to blog about. Think of content that will give value to your readers and grow the know, like and trust factor. The first step for this is to brainstorm all the questions that your target audience might ask you about your product or service. Put yourself in their shoes. What reservations they might have about buying your products and/ or services and write them all down. It doesn’t matter if these feel like silly questions or things that you might not want to blog about.
Get all the ideas out onto the page. I’ve started you off with some examples that I would use in my business blog, but continue brainstorming for yourself…
- How much does web design cost?
- Why should I hire a web designer?
- Why should I have a blog for my business?
- How long does it take to design a new brand and website?
- How much does web design cost?
Hopefully that’s got some ideas going for your business with questions you can offer the answers to in your blog posts.
Create headlines
Next, we’re going to look at creating great blog titles that’ll get people intrigued so that they click through to read your blog posts.title. To get your title-writing game on point, here are a few title examples that perform well…
Number headlines – Any headline that starts with a number, introducing a list post, for example “10 Tips for _____” or “5 ways to ___”
“How to” headlines – This is a simple option, but a good one. It will help to answer some of the questions your target market might have about your product or service, for example “How to (use your product)”.
Comparison headlines– These create interest by letting your readers know you’re going to be comparing two things and giving them a winner. An example I have created for this is DIY Vs professional web design.
Scarcity headline – This headline promises that the reader will be getting something few people have. Headlines that start with “The Secret of…” or “Little Known Tips for…” are playing on this principle.
Big promises headline – These headlines are assuring your reader that they’ll be getting a lot of information if they click, this category includes headlines that start with “The Ultimate Guide ___” or “Everything you need to know about___”.
If you’re feeling inspired by now, take this opportunity to scribble down all your ideas on paper or in your phone and you can create an ideas bank to refer back to later.
52 Blog post titles
For more help with creating your blog post titles and to get the ideas flowing I have created 52 blog post titles templates. That’s enough for a whole year!
- The Ultimate Guide to______
- How to ____: The Definitive Guide.
- 10 ways to ______
- (Topic) Glossary
- The complete guide to _____
- Everything you need to know about _______
- Forget (X) :Try (Y) instead
- The truth about ____
- The secret to____
- What no one tells you about ____
- Surprising facts about ____
- How to ____ without ____
- A (#) point checklist for ____
- (#) tips for _____
- How to ____ when you ____
- Questions you should ask before _____
- A Beginner’s Guide to ____
- Advice for _____
- (#) Must have _____
- (#) ways to ____
- (#) reasons why you should ____
- (#) Trends for _____ in (Year)
- (#) ____to consider for ____
- (#) Point checklist for ____
- (#) Types of ____
- (#) secrets to____
- 7. (#) Tips for busy ____
- 28. (#) Ideas for ____
- 29. The (#) ____Trends you need to know.
- 30. (#) ____ We Love
- 31. (#) Examples of ____ to inspire you
- 32. (#) Steps to ____
- 33. (#) Creative ways to____
- 34. Where to find ____
- 35. The Best _____
- 36. The Top 5/10____
- 37. Why should I ____?
- 38. How does ____ Work?
- 39. ____ Vs ____
- 40. ____ or ____?
- 41. (#) ____ ideas for ____
- 42. Why you should ____
- 43. A Quick Guide to ____
- 44. Time saving tips for ____
- 45. Top 5/10 FAQs about ____
- 46. Why I won’t ____
- 47. A Guide to the best ____
- 48. ____ is the new ____
- 49. (#) ____ every ____ should know about ____
- 50. (#) Myths you should know about____
- 51. (#) Questions answered about ___
- 52. The Essential Guide to ____
Blogging strategically
Remember one of the main reasons why you should be blogging for your business? To help your website get found on search engines, so optimising your website for SEO Search Engine Optimisation). In this case, it’s another great idea to think of all the things your ideal clients might type into Google to find your product and/ or service. By doing this, you’ll be coming up with keywords to use for your business. For my business, for example, some keywords would be: Web designer London, online branding and website designer, web design for creatives. Yes, these are phrases but we can still name them keywords.
Try to get inside the head of your ideal clients once you have identified who they are, their age, what they’re into. The deeper your understanding of your ideal audience, the easier it will be to detect which keywords out of the bunch they would have searched for.
Ok, now that you have some ideas for keywords that you want to rank for, how do you go about actually using a keyword in a blog post?
A bit more about Google…
When Google’s algorithm was less mature than it is today, it was easy to get your page to rank at the top of search results for certain phrases by repeating that keyword many times on the page.Google isn’t like that anymore. It now ranks pages that answer a query over ones that just repeat specific words. It’s tempting to want to do what’s known as ‘keyword stuffing’ which is just adding a keyword or phrase to a blog post as many times as you can, but Google is now intelligent and will spot this and actually penalise you for it.
Make posts reader friendly
Blog posts must be reader friendly, contain your key words in a non-spammy way and answer the query better than other posts out there. If you robotically mention your key word over and over in your blog posts this won’t sound natural and will also put readers off. Check out the pages that are currently ranking for your target keyword and think about how you can create a post better than that.
Now that we are wrapping up this blog post, I really hope you have a shed load of ideas for things to start blogging about for your business. I highly recommend setting up a really simple way to schedule in time to create your blog posts. My top tip here is simply to set aside a chunk of time per week, per month or whatever works with your schedule and make this your non negotiable blog post creation time.
The good thing is that the more posts you create the quicker your blog writing and creating process will become.
For a whole load more inspiration for your blog post take a look at this take a look at this post here from Yeost SEO.
If you need more help and guidance on how to blog for your business, just get in touch and ask me any questions you might have. I’m genuinely passionate about blogging as it has worked so well for me in my business, driving traffic to my website and creating leads and bringing me clients. I’ll be able to help you come up with a ton of content ideas for your blog too.
