This article covers: Do you ever wonder how you can get started with blogging? It’s not as hard as it sounds – bottom line, grab your Google Word Doc & get writing about the topic you know and THAT’s where you begin. Check out our blog post to learn more about the benefits of blogging and how to get started.
Fun fact, over 4 million blog posts are posted every single day.
We’ll say that again, over 4 million. So whoever said that blogging is dead, is completely wrong. In fact, a huge number of businesses credit blogging for reaching new audiences and driving their business forward. There are so many benefits to blogging and we are going to break them all down for you here. Plus, if you have been neglecting your blog or have never had one, we will give you some tips on how to get started with blogging and the reasons why you need to get those fingers tapping!
Let’s start with the basics…
Check Out These 5 Major Benefits of Blogging & Learn How to Get Started With Blogging Today!
What is blogging?
Blogging is a way to share your story and provide value to your audience. Blogs usually centre around a theme or niche. You can find blog posts on almost anything from travel, cooking, art, even blogs and blogging!
It’s typically ‘long-form content’, a way to share a bigger story with more details and value than a short tweet. It is a fantastic way to connect with people, to show your personality and to pass on information that people want to hear.
Why is blogging important for your business?
Getting started with blogging has so many benefits for you, your audience and your business. Check them out:
- You can connect with your audience in a more conversational, personal and authentic way. Starting a blog can showcase your personality, opinions, recommendations, tips across in a really accessible and easy way with a blog post. People can also comment and add their thoughts making it a really conversational and supportive channel.
- Blogging benefits you as it forms part of your content marketing strategy. Having ideas and writing topics for blog posts can then be broken down into ideas for Instagram, Facebook and other channels. This helps your content to go further and saves you time.
- Blogging gives you credentials. Blogging sets you up as an expert, it shows that you know your stuff and know how to answer questions that people are looking for answers for. The more value you provide, the more people will come back to you.
- Blogging is great for bringing traffic to your website. Google and other major search engines love new content, bots are constantly trolling and indexing your content and looking at keywords that they know searchers are looking for. Every time you post you are creating an opportunity for potential customers or clients to find you. When they see all of your value-driven content they will know that they have come to the right place.
- Blogging helps to grow your audience. If you have written a great inspiring or educational or funny blog that people love, people are going to want to share it. They can send links, add links in their own content and share it on social media.
How to get started with blogging & maximize the benefits so that you can start to see more traffic to your website:
1. Find a home for your blog
The best place for your blog is on your website. That way when people find your blog post you can easily encourage them to find out more about you and your services. Plus, as we said earlier, having a blog on your website helps to generate traffic to your site.
2. Start planning your content
A great way to start is to list out roughly 10 topics or go wild with more. These topics can be about your product, your service, the industry you are in or it can be questions to answer, or tips and tricks.
3. Think about the structure of your blogs
Every blog post should have a clear introduction that clearly says what your post is about, main content and summary. Draw people in to make them keep reading, then use headings to break up your content and make it easy for people to scan the post. Most importantly know your audience and talk to them, use your voice. If you’re chatty be chatty, if you’re formal be formal. What you say may have been said before but never by you. Interesting thought, right?
4. Learn about implementing keywords
You want your ideal readers to find your blog post. Anticipate what words they will be searching for, these are your keywords, and make sure you feature them in your blog. Don’t overdo it though, write conversationally and for your audience, not for Google.
Example of a targeted keyword – this blog post we are using ‘how to get started with blogging’ and you will find this long-tail-keyword throughout the text, in the title and in the body copy headlines.
5. Get writing!
Give it a go. You know your subject, you know what you want to say, you have your structure, so get writing. It is perfectly fine that it might be messy, frustrating, time-consuming and you may want to throw your laptop out of the window. Or you could fall in love with writing and wonder why you haven’t done this before. No matter what camp you’re in, the more you do it, the better you will get at it.
6. Consider using video and transcribing it.
Are you more of a speaker than a writer? Well, why not create some vlogs (video blogs). Vlogs are a great way to communicate to your ideal audience, have fun and show them more of your personality.
7. Make sure your blog content is actionable.
What do you want your reader to do at the end? Read more of your posts? Buy a product? Take a look at your services. Let them know, include a call to action (CTA). The more you can get people interested in your content, the better.
8. Turn the comments on.
Get feedback on your blog posts, encourage a conversation and invite people to comment on what you’ve talked about. Blogging is all about sharing after all.
We hope that by reading this you are all fired up to start blogging and can see the benefits that it brings to you and your business. If you want to know what other channels you should be looking at as part of your content marketing strategy, then check out our other blog posts. Until next time, happy writing.
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