How You Should be Blogging
Done right blogging can help you build a stronger brand, and help your business grow faster by increasing the ranking of your website and thus generating more sales or leads. Sadly, many people get off to a poor start, so they see little or no benefit from all their hard work, and fail to maintain their enthusiasm for blogging.
Step 1: Blog What You Know or Love
Picking a theme for your blog is easy because you are great at something, right? Use your knowledge of a specific topic or love of your business to help you decide a general theme for your blog. Just remember the goal is to grow your business, so you don’t want the focus of your blog to be too narrow or too broad.
Are You a Great Writer?
If you are a writer, then you don’t need a lot of help other than the advice we have already given you, pick a theme and focus on relevant topics that don’t stray too far from the keywords and keyword phrases that will help potential customers or clients find your website and the products or services you offer easier.
If You’re Not a Great Writer, Then Stick to the Facts
If you’re not a great writer, this is the best piece of advice you will ever get, STICK TO THE FACTS. Writing about what you know and what you do on a daily basis is easy, informative, and full of the keywords people use to search for your business. This will also help you stay motivated to create great content on a regular schedule, which will keep your visitors engaged and generate higher rankings in search engines.
“If you want to grow your business by blogging, write about what you know and love, and stick to the facts.”
Step 2: Create a Blog Post Template
Creating an attractive and functional blog post template will help keep you focused when you are writing new articles and it will also make it easier for your readers to scroll through your post to find what they are looking for if they are not interested in reading your entire blog post, which is quite common.
This blog post is a googe example of a template that is attractive, flexible, and functional. You will notice we use the tried and true steps method because people love step by step guides. However, you can easily remove the steps and use it to blog on topics that do not lend themselves to a step by step format. We also try to keep our paragraphs short, add bold text above paragraphs, and include high-quality pictures when we feel it is helpful to the reader.
How to Use the Blog Post Template You Created
The theme we use allows you to save pages, posts, sections, and just about anything else to a library. It will also ask you if you would like to clone a page or use a layout from your library when creating a new post. These features make creating new blog posts incredibly easy. However, you can also start new posts by installing the “Duplicate Post” plugin by LittleBizzy and cloning either your template (saved as a draft) or your last post, then changing the blog title, headings, body text and pictures, while maintaining the general layout of your post.
Step 3: Blog Post Research
If you followed our earlier advice, then this is going to go very well. You are blogging about a topic you know and love, so researching these topics is going to take less time and be more enjoyable. If you have old notes, relevant business information, or other data that will help you write your blog post now is the time to organize your notes and gather any additional information.
Organized Inspiration
Sit down at your desk with a cup of green tea and think about how you are going to present this information to your readers. How you arrange your information is not as important as having or creating a system that works for you.
If you are visual by nature, you may want to lay out images on your desktop or computer for inspiration. As an example, we created a folder of pictures for this blog post, gave each of them a relevant name and then decided which pictures would be best for this post. You can move the pictures you don’t use to another folder and use them on a future blog post. And since they have already be named, sized, and optimized for your website, you will save time creating future posts.
Step 4: Create a Conducive Blogging Atmosphere
Because you are planning to blog regularly, you need to ensure your blogging space has a fantastic atmosphere, which is going to be different for each person. Don’t worry if your view is different than the picture above, for some people a neat office desk with multiple monitors may look just as beautiful
I prefer a full-on geek atmosphere with a three monitor setup, and a room full of desktop computers, a laptop, two cell phones, a landline, tablet, several routers, and numerous other devices because I am a proud geek. I love this type of environment because it matches my personality and relates to the things I blog about.
Organize Your Blogging Space
You have created a pleasant atmosphere for blogging, and now you need to make sure it is also well organized. Once again, remember, this is going to be a long-term project, so a pleasant and well-organized workspace is going to be essential. However, “well organized” is going to mean something different for everyone, so be sure you are creating a workspace that is suitable for you!
Step 5: Get Motivated to Blog
Fantastic, you finally have everything in place to start your first blog or create your next blog post. However, you need to get motivated, and stay motivated to make this work. It is unlikely that you are going to see any results from what may be a clumsy first attempt to write an article but with hard work and determination you will get better, a lot better.
Stay Motivated
Don’t lose faith, never quit, and keep on going no matter what anyone including that voice in your head says. You can and will make this work if you keep working on your business, blog, and your website.
Five Fantastic Quotes from Henry Ford
“Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement.”
“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”
“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
Step 6: Autopost to Your Social Media Accounts
Autoposting to social media accounts is a great way to create more exposure for your articles and Get Better Rankings. While the value of social signals in Google’s algorithms is a hotly debated topic, their ability to generate more links is not, and everyone agrees more links from the right websites will improve your rankings.
This strategy will only work if you create high-quality content because no one wants to share useless or poorly written articles. You will need to put in a lot of effort to get results, but you will be well rewarded if you create fantastic content.
Social Media Autoposting Plugins
These WordPress plugins will help you share your articles on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Wait a Month or Two Before Sharing Your Posts on Social Media
We highly recommend waiting a month or two to share your articles on your social media accounts, which gives Google time to index the post, attribute the original content to your website, and your regular readers’ incentive to visit your site to find the latest posts.
Make it Easy for Your Readers’ to Share Your Posts
You will also want to consider using a social sharing plugin because it will make it much easier for your readers’ to share your blog posts. There are many excellent WordPress Social Media Sharing Plugins available that will help you share your posts.
Final Thoughts
Giving careful thought to each step of this process will save you a lot of time and effort in creating blog articles and posting them to your social media accounts. The goal of this article is to make blogging easier because you will need to be diligent and highly motivated to be successful.
Failure is not in your vocabulary. Learn from each post, and your skills and productivity will gradually increase. Soon you will be writing fantastic articles that will garner the attention and links they deserve.
Summary
- Blog What You Know or Love
- Stick to the Facts
- Use a Blog Post Template
- Research Every Blog Topic
- Blog in a Pleasant Atmosphere
- Be Motivated and Stay Motivated
- Autopost to Social Media
- Make it Easy to Share Your Posts
Want to Learn More?
