6 Steps Towards Becoming a Better Blogger

Feb 8, 2018

6 Steps Towards Becoming a Better Blogger

If writing a blog is part of your small business content creation strategy, you may struggle with how to make good content great.

The average marketer spends anywhere from 1 to 2 hours creating a 500-word blog post. That’s a lot of time and energy to spend on one fairly short post. As a small business owner, you don’t have the time to waste creating posts that don’t drive the traffic needed to boost your business and improve web traffic.

Before you sit down to start writing the next post for your small business blog, here are a few tips on how make sure the content you create generates the most value possible.

Avoid Self Promotion

This may seem counterintuitive since a blog is supposed to help market your brand, but avoiding promotion is the most important rule for running a successful content creation strategy.

Consumers are more savvy now than ever when it comes to spotting content that’s little more than poorly disguised advertising. From boosted posts on Facebook to those clickbait headlines that appear at the bottom of most web pages, consumers fully understand what paid content looks like. Consumers also know that paid content offers very little value. Any blog that spends more time trying to sell something to its audience than it does trying to inform them will find it difficult to attract any interest.

Do your business and brand an enormous favor by focusing on creating great content rather than content that tries to sell. By developing great content that offers real value, your blog will have no problems attracting visitors, which will lead to more business in the long run.

Visuals Have Value

Pictures, videos, and infographics all have a lot of value as part of any content creation strategy. Visuals offer a number of advantages compared to just words on a page. Both complex and simple ideas can be better and more thoroughly explained when presented in a visual form. Visuals also offer the advantage of being more accessible to your audience as they require less time to process than reading a blog post, while also having the added benefit of being easier to share on social media. While creating visuals may take more time and be more skill intensive, they offer a great return on your investment.

Point to Examples

Studies have found that people have an easier time understanding complex points when the information is presented using relatable examples. Your opinion has value, but real world examples and related life experiences carry far more weight for your audience. Always try to back up what your writing about using case studies, citing sources, quoting experts, and using as many different types of examples as possible. Not only will this help to establish you as an authoritative voice on a subject, it will also add legitimacy to both your brand and blog.

A Personal Touch Matters

Good writers have the ability to attract an audience because their individual voice offers the reader something of value. Whether an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand, a great sense of humor, or a unique way of looking at things, the more of your own personality you can inject into your writing the better chance you have of developing a dedicated audience. Find your personal flare and use that to help establish your brand. Those small touches that you add to the content you create will make it all that more valuable to both your readers and your brand.

Don’t Skip the Small Stuff

Grammar matters. So does organization, order, and subject flow. No one wants to waste their time reading content that’s either poorly organized or rife with grammar and spelling mistakes. If you struggle with creating content that has a natural flow, take the time to write an outline of bullet points of what you want to cover and then fold those topics into your headlines to improve the flow of your post. Not only will you find it difficult creating an audience for poorly written content, you also risk jeopardizing your brand’s reputation.

Develop a Plan for Spreading Your Content

Most small business owners will need to work at establishing themselves before they develop a huge following that eagerly awaits every new post. To help grow your audience, you need to have a strategy in place that will attract new visitors to the content you create. Some potentially successful strategies could include:

  • Email newsletter. Include all of your latest posts as part of a weekly newsletter to those on your opt-in email list.
  • Social media. Add a link to your content on your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. social media platform whenever a new post goes live.
  • Search engine optimization isn’t just for your core content. Google will often display and rank relevant blog content in search results just as highly as core page content when properly optimized.
  • Guest blog. Whenever you have the opportunity to add content as a guest to another website, you gain exposure to a new audience that could quickly become a fan.
  • Write frequently. To develop a following, you need to create content on a regular basis. An audience will quickly lose interest or simply forget you’re there if you produce content sporadically.

These are just a few of the areas that small business owners struggle with when implementing a content creation strategy. If you manage to successfully complete the steps above, you will slowly start to develop the audience your business needs to continue to grow.

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