DIGITAL GROWTH
Five winning ways to create better blogs
Chances are, you already know many reasons why your business should be blogging. Whether it’s to drive more traffic to your website, create more content to share on social media, increase the chances of your website showing in search or educating your customers, blogging is now an essential way to market your business online. Here, Liam Lally (pictured), founder of Zaddle Internet Marketing, gives his top tips for effective blogging and the tools available to help you.
The problem for most businesses is that we’re not all natural writers, and once we are asked to write a blog we sit and stare at a blank page on a laptop or computer, wondering where to start and what to blog about. Here are some ideas to help you get started:
1. IDEAS Planning what to write is the key to making it easier to write and maintain content for a great blog. One of the simplest ways to come up with content ideas is to simply answer questions about your product or service. A great website that can help you with this is
answerthepublic.com. Put in a keyword or phrase
related to your business, and see the many questions people have asked online about that topic. Export these questions and start
to formulate a content calendar to cover these questions. Some of these questions might
be simple answers and others may need a longer form answer, so it might be sensible to put the short form questions together and create a “ten things you didn’t know about…” blog post. You can do a couple of free
searches per day on this website so use them wisely.
2. WRITE, DON’T EDIT How often do you sit down, with your idea firmly in mind, and then take 30 minutes to write the first sentence? In that time, you’ve changed your
mind four times, you’ve corrected three spelling mistakes and you’ve made two grammatical changes.
84 business network October 2019
Adding a video to your blog can help increase readership
The best way to write your blog
is to just… write! Don’t worry about spelling
mistakes or the content being in the correct order, just get everything from your brain down on to the paper. This is your first draft. When we read content online we
are seeing a version that has probably gone through multiple drafts and changes, yet when it comes to writing our own, we think we will be hitting the publish button once we’ve finished. Editing your content from the
minute you type your first word will mean you are constantly losing your train of thought, spending more time on spelling mistakes and less time on sharing your amazing knowledge about your topic. So, write, don’t edit.
3. DICTATE YOUR BLOG POST I’ve come across many business owners over the past ten years who, when asked to write a piece of content about their industry that they are experts at, will sit staring blankly at a screen.
It seems the minute people ask
them to ‘write’, their mind goes blank. And yet if I was to ask them a
question about the subject they are writing about, and they can answer verbally, they would come back with a fantastic, detailed and well- presented answer. If this describes you, then you
might find it easier to dictate your answer to your phone or computer. Google Docs, Windows 10 and
Apple all have dictation features – in fact this article was initially dictated to a Google Doc before the editing and refinement started.
4. USE IMAGES (AND VIDEO) When people are reading articles online, it can help to maintain the reader’s attention by using images throughout your blog. Your brain
processes images 60,000 times quicker than text, so use them in your blog to tell the story. Using your own images is always
the best place to start, but if you don’t have the time to take these pictures then head to websites that offer royalty free images, such as Pexels, Unsplash or
Stocksnap.io. However, always check the usage rights of these images before adding them to your blog, even if they come from these websites. Once your blog is live you will
want to make it as interesting as possible to drive readers to read your article. Why not create a short, eye-
catching video of the main points of your blog?
www.Lumen5.com is a great
website that allows you to upload your blog and then choose images and videos to create content that will stop those thumbs scrolling on the social media platforms.
5. PROOFREADING Once your blog is complete, ideally you would want someone to read it and help correct any errors. A couple of apps that can help
you do this yourself are Hemingway and Grammarly. Copying your blog content
across to these apps can give you lots of feedback that you can use to improve your writing.
All these tools and tips (and more) are covered in the Digital Growth Programme’s blogging workshop. A new schedule of events will be announced shortly. For Leicestershire businesses, check www.leics-
digital.co.uk/events. If you’re based in D2N2, go to
www.d2n2growthhub.co.uk
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