Write relevant and compelling articles that your buyer persona will not only search for, but enjoy reading when they get to it.
This blog aims to guide you through a quick and pain-free way of creating such blog articles, optimising your previous ones and generating ideas for future posts.
You will find yourself with more visitors and improved chances of social sharing with your content, if you create what visitors want to read.
BLOGGING GOAL: Get found by the relevant visitors, build credibility and trust, turn website visitors into paying customers.
1. Idea Generation
Come up with 10 starting ideas for blog posts. The crème de la crème of blog post titles are always ones that are questions which your buyer persona would already ask. Fashion designer? “Which materials should I use to sketch designs?”
2. Complete our Editorial Calendar
The Thrive Editorial Calendar for creating super-duper blog posts will quickly become the foundation of every blog post you create.
Why?
It will ensure that you are creating relevant content, suitable to your persona that you haven’t already created. Quality content is key!
3. Write an Article
Select one of your original blogging ideas and create a post around the topic that is 200 – 500 words long. Only focus on the content for now – the rest of the magic happens later. Now, get writing…!
4. Use Imagery
A relevant image is key to making your article visually standout, it will also come in handy when sharing your content on social media sites. Make sure you caption the image file something relating to your blog (think keywords) and always bear in mind copyright rules.
5. Keyword Strategies
Keyword-rich anchor text links: Perfect for increasing a user’s interaction with your website and content. Include one or two links within blog posts that take a reader through to other parts of your website. Make sure the link is relevant, enticing and naturally appears within the flow of the text, where possible.
Meta Descriptions: Every blog post needs a strong meta description, so when a blog post appears in search results there’s a brief, relevant and enticing intro – you want to hook the potential lead. Make it no longer than 150 characters, otherwise it will be cut short by the search engines.
6. Call to Action
If you’re embracing inbound methodology, you should ideally have a call to action at the bottom of each blog post. This encourages users to further engage with your website than a keyword rich anchor text link. Although it doesn’t necessarily need to be related to the blog post, there will be higher chances of engagement if it is. This is just one of the ways you become a “lead generation machine”.
7. Key Takeaways
Each article should have a purpose, if it doesn’t have one, it is rubbish. Harsh, but true. Some advice to clarify the content marketing process would be to create key takeaways / objectives etc. for your article and finish your post by identifying these. Make the reader doubly aware of what they should have learnt from your post.
8. White Space
In the publishing industry, name journalism, we see white space as the enemy (coming from a once journalism student who tirelessly focused on designed news pages with no space at all). In blogging, we love white space! Make your paragraphs shorter, snappier and clearer. Allow the reader to skim read as much, or as little, as they’d like, by creating lots of white space to ease the job on their eyes.
9. Text Formatting – bold, links etc.
Make text stand out where it needs to. Play about with fonts, colours, sizes, subtitles. If something is important to catch, embolden it.
10. Tags and Topics
Create two things – tags and topics. Blog topics make it easy for the visitor to find what they’re really interested in reading. Come up with a wide range. Tags are ideal for Keyword Marketing and identifying the core subjects of your blog post and who is looking for each post.
11. Frequency Rules
Never ever publish more than one blog a day. Always try to aim for at least twice a week. Ideally you should have one a week at bare minimum, if you’re a small business. As you grow, this number should go up. Obviously this is why a lot of companies are put off by blogging – its time consuming! However, any company who blogs at all does better than one who never does!
