James Patterson — July 5, 2018 — July 5, 2018
Free-Photos / Pixabay
Whether you’re a new business trying to build brand awareness or an established business expanding your reach with digital strategies, you need a blog to vamp up your content marketing campaign.
Blogging is an awesome and effective way to reach your target market and show them how valuable your products and services are. More importantly, it helps you establish yourself as an industry leader that consumers trust for helpful information. As such, it’s no surprise that 86% of B2C companies and 91% of B2B companies are using content marketing to fuel their growth.
But, how do you start a blog when you’re not even good at writing? Here are some of the things you can do.
- Know Who Your Target Readers Are
No content marketing strategy will ever be successful if it’s not tailored specifically for the target market. So, before you even start thinking of blogging, you should have a full understanding of who your target market or audience is.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who is your ideal customer and what demographic do they belong to?
- What are the problems, pain points, and challenges that they face on a daily basis in their personal and professional lives?
- What kind of solutions are they looking for?
- How does your products and/or services address their problems?
When you have the answers to these questions, you can better determine the tone and voice of your blog, as well as the topics you should be writing about.
- Benchmark Your Competitors
Who are your direct and indirect competitors? Direct competitors are businesses that offer the same products and services to the same market, while indirect competitors offer slightly different products and services to the same market and satisfy the same need.
Look at their blog. Which ones are successfully reaching their audience and gaining traction in terms of engagement and profit? What topics are they writing about?
Competitors who have been blogging way before you started have most likely written a slew of blog posts relevant to your niche. Benchmarking their content will help you come up with topics that will stand out.
- Create a Blog Page
After benchmarking, the next thing to do is to create a blog page! There’s no better way to commit yourself to creating a blog than actually making one. You most likely already have a website. No matter what CMS platform you use, you can create a new webpage for your blog.
Choose a layout that will make it easy for your audience to determine what your blog page is about with just a glance! Your website designer and developer can help you with this.
- List Down ALL the Topics You Want to Write About
You may not be a good writer, but you know what topics you want to write about that will be helpful to your audience.
These can be topics that your customers often ask you about or topics that are related to your products and services. Make sure that the topics you’re writing about answer problems and concerns of your target readers.
You can also use tools that will help you determine the topics that your target market is searching for. Buzzsumo, for instance, allows you to see top-performing content surrounding relevant keywords. Ahrefs is a similar tool that offers backlink checking, competitor analysis, keyword research, and more.
- Generate Compelling, Click-worthy Titles
Think like a user. Try this. Go to Google or your favorite search engine and search for anything that interests you. Now, what blog titles got you to click and open that page? What titles did you avoid clicking?
When you’re trying to finesse a title, you need to ensure that you’re accurately representing the content of the blog post and conveying the value of your article. Some writers come up with a title after they create the body of the article, while others write the title and create content based on the title. Either way, it’s important that your headline/title is consistent with your content.
Don’t hesitate to whip out your thesaurus when coming up with catchy titles. You probably noticed how your competitors use the words “incredible,” “amazing,” “successfully,” “surprising,” and the like.
You don’t want to be stingy with adjectives and adverbs, but you want to keep it concise as well. Note that you want to keep your titles between 60 to 70 characters so tat search engines don’t truncate your headline in the SERP.
- Write an Introduction
So, you think you’re not a good writer. Fret not. You can learn to write your blog posts step by step. Begin with a brief introduction.
When writing your intro, talk about why you want to discuss this topic and how it can address a problem. You can also discuss the benefits that your readers can reap from reading this article.
If, for instance, you’re writing about “How to Pick the Right Types of Footwear for a Specific Occasion,” then you may want to begin by talking about how a lot of people find it difficult to choose appropriate footwear for various occasions. You can provide examples in your intro so that your readers can relate to that scenario.
- Outline All the Relevant Tips and Points You’d Like to Mention in Your Blog Post
Now that you have an intro, your article has direction. It’s time for you to create an outline for the body of your article.
Begin by listing down all the tips and solutions you’d like to talk about in your article. You can draw from your expertise and experience or do some research to supplement your own input.
Listing them down will help you organize your thoughts better. These lists you write can be turned into the subheadings for the body of your article.
After writing your list, try talking about the different points individually. Dive deeper into these points and discuss elaborately. Don’t forget to write a conclusion at the end that summarizes your key points.
- Hire a Content Marketing Writer
If you’re still not convinced that writing a blog post is something you can do consistently and continuously for the lifetime of your blog, then look into hiring a content writer or partnering up with a digital marketing agency.
You can collaborate with them on your blog. In the process of working with blog experts, you’ll learn content marketing tips that will help you become a better writer and content marketer.
Blogging will definitely help you establish authority in your specific niche while improving your brand’s online presence. If you’re not a good writer, don’t worry. There are ways for you to learn how to write effectively!
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