The beginner’s guide to blogging: 4 steps to get started
Table of contents
1. Understanding Your Audience and Setting Goals
2. Developing a Content Strategy
Defining Content Themes and Topics
Planning and Organizing Content
3. Writing Compelling Blog Posts
Crafting Engaging Headlines and Introductions
Structuring Blog Posts for Readability
4. Promoting and Measuring Blog Success
Promoting Blog Content
Measuring blog success
5. Conclusion
So, you’ve started a business. You’ve got a product that you’re excited about. And now, you’re confronted with the seemingly impossible task of actually reaching — and convincing — your target audience to purchase your product.
What all business owners eventually learn is that customers aren’t simply lured in by good products. They’re actually following the scent of your brand. They want to know what you stand for, and what you think about different topics in your industry. This is where blogging comes in.
Business blogging is a key tool in your belt that will fuel brand awareness, increase lead generation, and ensure that your target audience is aware of you through SEO. Here are the four steps you need to get started.
1. Understanding Your Audience and Setting Goals
To get started, you will need to create personas for your target audience. Content that’s written for everyone will impact absolutely no one. But, content that’s meant for Mr. Smith, the owner of a small business that’s struggling to organize his accounts and is searching for software that will alleviate his problems can be a lead generation opportunity.
To create a buyer persona for your business, start by walking in their shoes. Give them a name, an occupation. Then, think through their day-to-day. Ask and answer the following questions:
What kind of companies do they work at?
What does their typical workday look like?
Do they generally manage people?
How do they like to consume information about their industry?
How do they typically get introduced to new products?
What are their goals? What do they hope to accomplish at their job?
What problems do they run into while trying to achieve their goals?
You won’t know the answers to these questions right away. That’s okay. Here are three things you can do to find some answers:
Scour through Linkedin profiles and find 6-7 people that fit your target audience. Study their profiles, and read about what they’ve accomplished in their roles.
Read through job descriptions of roles that your target personas hold. JDs will highlight expectations, goals, and their day-to-day.
Reach out to people who are using your product already. Have conversations about the industry. Understand their worldview.
Creating personas won’t be a one-time activity. You’ll find yourself returning to these (maybe physical) cards and fleshing them out as you get more information. The goal of this exercise is to shape your blog. After all, if there’s no TV in your living room, what’s all your furniture going to point at?
Next, you want to set realistic goals for your blog. Writing without a horizon can feel very much Sisyphean. Ideally, you want each one of your blog posts to accomplish something. And you should know what that something is before you even start writing.
Use the acronym SMART to set your goals:
Specific. Your goal shouldn’t be all-encompassing.
Measurable. You’ll need to know whether you’ve achieved your goal. Make sure to spell out what success looks like.
Achievable. Setting goals far out of your reach is demoralizing. Take into account what you’re capable of when setting a goal.
Relevant. Your goals should drive you to where you need to be. Don’t set goals for the sake of achieving them.
Time-bound. Don’t give yourself an undefined period of time to find success. Small steps make a marathon.
2. Developing a Content Strategy
Once you have a target audience and SMART goals, you can turn it into a full-fledged content strategy. A content strategy is built by understanding the buyer’s journey, and prioritizing where you want your content to meet them. You may need to start with a content audit to understand what’s already in front of you and how it resonates.
After a content audit, you’ll define specific content pillars for your blog. You’ll add 10-15 keywords underneath each of those topics. Finally, you’ll work to optimize every single blog you publish in order to reach the right audience.
Defining Content Themes and Topics
As a brand, you’ll be able to develop a reputation as an expert within a certain niche. It’s up to you to make sure both Google and your audience see you as that expert. This is where content pillars come in.
Content pillars are categories of topics that you feel confident writing about and dispensing advice about. Built up over time, Google’s algorithm will start to see you as a leader in your field. To begin building content pillars, identify 3-5 specific topics that you’re knowledgeable about. For example, as a content & SEO professional, my content pillars would be: writing advice, SEO fundamentals, top-of-funnel strategy, and ranking on Google.
Finding your content pillars might take a bit of experimentation. Start by researching what open questions exist in your field — in other words, what are people curious about? Answering questions that no one has will not get you anywhere. Not only should your content pillars be relevant to your business goals, but they should also be prioritizing traffic.
Once you’ve created your content pillars, the second layer of your content strategy is keyword research. Using tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMRush, collect about 15-20 broad, short-tail keywords underneath your main topics. These are the keywords your blog posts should fall under. When you’re writing each blog post, one of these keywords will be your primary keyword. You will also pick a longer-tail, secondary keyword. This combination will allow you to hyper-target your content to ensure it’ll reach the right audience.
Creating a content strategy can be a confusing and tedious process. Consider adding an external consultant to your team that can build these foundations for you.
Planning and Organizing Content
Experts agree that without a regular cadence of publishing content, you will not gain much traction in your market. Therefore, a huge part of content strategy is actually planning and organizing content. Analyze the market, keep up with trends, and maintain a consistent publishing schedule.
How far in advance you should plan is all dependent on what your business goals are. Some large companies have up to a year of planning, some bloggers may not know what’s planned for the following week. However, the point of a content calendar is to serve you. You may design it in a way that benefits you.
You can use Airtable, Google Sheets, Excel, or other organizing tools to host your calendar. It’s important to ensure that the team members who need it have access to it. Your calendar should include:
Title or topic of planned pieces
Expected shipped dates
Current status
Basic SEO information, a content brief; if created.
Rough outline
Different types of content. Schedule blog posts, customer stories, editorials, etc.
Planning in this manner takes away the stress of the version of you that’s going to sit down and write these pieces. When you know what’s coming up, you’ll also automatically start making connections with your work in a way you hadn’t before. You’ll be able to think of LinkedIn posts, plan to bring up certain topics in customer conversations, and talk about your business in expansive ways.
To begin, note down all the topics you’re able to confidently write about. Use the content themes you’re already created and expand on them. Be very specific, write down titles, questions you can answer, and perspectives you’ll be able to share. Next to each idea, write down the format of the content you see fit. Vary your content ideas across blog posts, social media posts, visuals, videos, and customer stories. You don’t have to hit every single format, but you should hit at least 3 different types.
Start with planning out the next two weeks. Understand what it takes to meet your deadlines, and adjust your calendar from there. To start, I’d recommend posting at least 2 content pieces a week. Alter that number if you have more writers.
3. Writing Compelling Blog Posts
Finally, finally! Writing! You’ve laid out your strategy, you’ve got your potential topics in front of you. You know your target audience. Now, you have to find your voice. If you’re an individual blogger of a small brand, finding your voice is as simple as beginning to write. Bigger brands may have more hoops to jump through.
Writing is a craft, practiced to be perfected, just like other skills. But lucky for you, there is a formula to good blog writing. It includes drawing your audience in with clear headlines and clever introductions. Tell your readers exactly what you’re teaching, and deliver factual information in a concise manner. Drafting a content brief for each piece, with an outline, will help you stay organized in your message.
Crafting Engaging Headlines and Introductions
Readers make the decision to continue on with content within 10 to 20 seconds. That means your introduction is where you must hook your reader. Tell the reader immediately and exactly what they’ll gain from clicking into your content by writing a clear headline and meta description.
Here are three things you can do to craft concise and powerful headlines:
Use strong verbs. Verbs are what make your writing come alive, so use them to grab people's attention.
Use numbers. Numbers are attention-grabbing and can help to quantify your claims.
Ask a question. Asking a question can be a great way to get people thinking about your topic and encourage them to click through to your post.
Your introductory paragraph should draw the reader in even more. Consider including a short, personal anecdote if applicable. But be aware of how your audience will react. Avoid falling into the long-story-short-recipe trap, where bloggers will include an enormously long backstory, leading into a recipe. Readers, in this case, are simply looking for the recipe.
Here are a few tips for crafting engaging introductions:
Start with a strong opening sentence. The first sentence of your introduction should be attention-grabbing and make people want to read more.
Provide some background information. If your topic is complex, provide some background information to help readers understand it.
State your thesis statement. Your thesis statement is the main point of your post, so make sure to state it clearly in the introduction.
In addition to these tips, it's also important to ensure that your headlines and introductions adhere to Google's SEO guidelines. This means using relevant keywords and phrases throughout your writing and optimizing your titles and meta descriptions. By following these tips, you can craft engaging headlines and introductions that will help you to improve your blog's search engine ranking and attract more readers.
Structuring Blog Posts for Readability
The way people scan through a text or web page is in the shape of an upside-down L. Meaning, they’ll read through your introductory paragraph and then scan down through the subheadings. If something there catches their eye, they’ll continue on into a deeper dive.
With that in mind, you can certainly structure your blog posts to optimize for readability and engagement.
Use subheadings to break up your text and make it easier to scan. Subheadings help readers quickly find the information they're looking for, and they also make your blog post more visually appealing. When writing your subheadings, be sure to make them clear and concise, and use keywords that are relevant to your topic.
Use storytelling to engage your readers. People love stories, and they're more likely to read and remember information that is presented in a narrative format. When you're writing your blog post, try to weave a story throughout your text. This will help your readers stay engaged and make your content more memorable.
Include SEO guidelines and internal and external links. When writing your blog post, be sure to include relevant keywords throughout your text. This will help your post rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). You should also include internal and external links to other relevant websites. This will help your readers learn more about your topic and improve the overall quality of your content.
Promoting and Measuring Blog Success
So, now you’ve published your blogs. They’re out there in the world. Now, you have to do a retrospective of your work and measure its success. Garnering organic traffic is not a short-term goal. This will take time. In the meanwhile, you have to promote your blog content and measure its performance in different ways.
Promoting Blog Content
Each blog post you write should also have a promotional plan. This should be included in the content brief you write. Based on the audience for a blog and the story you want to tell, each promotional plan should be customized.
To begin, list out all available channels. Include the social media platforms you or your brand uses, any influencers in the industry you work with, an email marketing list, and any other forms of ongoing marketing. Then, pick out 1-3 channels for each blog that you write. Don’t promote each blog post on every channel — it can overwhelm and confuse your readers.
Instead, give each channel its own personality. Invest in each channel and work on building out an audience. Get to know what resonates with each channel and only promote blogs that match up with the readers’ wants. Respond to each comment and encourage your readers to offer feedback and their opinions.
Measuring Blog Performance
Be sure to maintain a holistic perspective of how your blog performs over time. Success in this field can look massively different from brand to brand, industry to industry. That being said, there are some basic metrics you should also be paying attention to over time:
Total visitors. An increase over time in this metric will tell you if your content is resonating with an audience.
Organic traffic. Use this metric to measure your SEO efforts.
Time on page. This metric will tell you if readers are reading your content or skimming through it.
Conversion rates. If you have an action you want readers to take (request a demo, subscribe to a newsletter, etc), this metric will show how successful you are at convincing users to make that decision.
SERP rankings. Keep a running list of the keywords you’re targeting. Go back to these search pages to see if your keywords are ranking.
To measure blog performance, use the Google suite of tools including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads.
Conclusion
Writing a blog to promote your business and build your brand is an important aspect of marketing. It’s also an extremely creative outlet that you can use to let your audience know you. People want to know your story, and they want a reason to feel connected to the products they use.
Send me an email at poojapbaxi@gmail.com if you need help laying the foundation of a content strategy or executing an existing one. Let’s talk!
