So, you’re thinking about writing some blogs, eh?
Well, if you want to:
- Write great blogs
- Grow your business
Then you’re in the right place! Welcome to the Complete Guide to Blog Writing for Business Growth.
In this guide, we’ll be running through all our top-secret blog writing tips and tricks, directly from the minds of our expert content strategy experts. We’ll teach you how you can top the search engines, entice your target audience and nurture leads to help boost conversions and, ultimately, grow your business.
Let’s get started with a little bit of the why.
5 Benefits of blog writing for businesses
Before we get stuck into the guide proper, it’s important that we understand why exactly we write blogs in the first place.
We don’t write them for fun (well, I do), we write them for purpose. Here is what a well-formed blog content strategy can do for your business:
1. Increase website traffic
Regularly updated blogs can improve your website’s search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your site (you’ll need to conduct some careful search engine optimisation (SEO) research if you want this to work, but we’ll get onto that later).
In fact, businesses that maintain a strong blog generate 55% more website visitors than those without. Blogging is the backbone of any good digital marketing strategy, it’s the slow-and-steady way to generate more traffic and nurture your prospective customers.
2. Build authority and credibility
High-quality content positions your business as an industry leader and trusted source of information.
Say, for example, you sell HVAC systems (sexy, we know).
A buyer from a logistics business is tasked with finding the best HVAC company to provide air conditioning systems to their warehouses.
For months, this buyer has been reading your blogs, learning all about how HVAC systems work, the benefits of them, how to choose the right one and other unique content all about HVAC. They now trust your business.
Now they’re tasked with actually buying HVAC systems, who do you think they’ll get in touch with? That’s right, your business.
The same principle applies to all industries: nurture prospects with your blogs, build authority by providing useful information and be the credible choice when it comes time to buy. If you have no blog content, this simply will not happen.
3. Engage your audience
Blogs allow you to communicate directly with your customers, fostering relationships and building loyalty.
It’s a fantastic way to stay in touch with your existing customers, ensuring that you’re their #1 favourite supplier.
4. Generate leads and boost conversion
While blogs aren’t always designed as conversion content, well-crafted blog posts can lead readers to take action, such as subscribing to your newsletter or making a purchase.
Make sure that all of your blogs have well crafted calls-to-action (CTAs) that guide readers onto either further reading, your product pages or contact pages. No blog should ever end without something the reader can click on and continue.
5. Support your social media marketing
Blogs provide valuable content to share on social media platforms, increasing your reach and engagement.
Any new blog is a talking point for your social channels.
How to set goals for your blog writing
So, we understand why we write blogs, now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty – the process behind great blog writing.
As with most great things, we start with mapping out your goals – what do you want to achieve with your blogs?
Do you want to:
- Drive more traffic?
- At this stage, it’s important that you define how much traffic you aim to drive to your website through your blog. Make sure you take note of your current traffic levels before getting started.
- Generate engagement?
- Determine how you will measure reader engagement (this might be through comments, shares, time on page, bounce rate, backlinks, etc).
- Convert readers?
- Set targets for conversions resulting from your blog (e.g., email sign-ups, product sales).
- Build brand awareness?
- Aim to enhance your brand’s visibility and reputation through your content. Many businesses rely on their blog simply to establish themselves as an industry authority.
Understanding your goals will feed into your blog plan…
How to plan your business’ blog
Sure, you can just start writing about the first thing that comes to your mind, however, this is far less likely to provide the results you’re after.
Successful blogs are the product of careful planning. Here’s what you need to do:
Identify your target audience
Who are you talking to? Who do you want to be talking to?
If you don’t know your target audience, how will you ever write content that they actually want to read? You need to understand:
Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, and education level of your audience.
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, and pain points of your audience.
Customer persona: Create detailed personas to guide your content creation.
This process will require a little bit of market research. Have a look at the content your competitors are creating – who are they targeting?
Have a look at your existing clients/customers – note their industries, identify their decision makers and learn what interests them. We often recommend opening a dialogue with your existing customers to find out what they actually want to read about. You might be surprised by what you find out!
Choose blog topics
Once you know who your blog is for, it’s time to start planning out your blog topics. If you’re writing for SEO, this should always be preceded by some keyword research.
Your keywords should feature in your headings and throughout your body copy.
If your blog is not necessarily SEO driven, then choose your blog topics based on industry news and updates or choose a topic that you’re knowledgeable on and that you’re comfortable sharing with your audience. Identify customer pain points and address common challenges and questions that your audience are facing.
For example, we’re knowledgeable on blog writing, and we’re sharing this blog to help our audience (you) to write better blogs!
We recommend a healthy mix of SEO content and other content, as this will help to ensure your blogs are being seen by the right people at the right time. We recommend using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ahrefs to help conduct your keyword research.
Create a content calendar
We can’t state enough how important a content calendar is!
Without our calendars, we’d lose all sense of organisation. Make sure you note what you’re writing, when you’re writing it and what your deadlines are.
Ensure that everyone involved with the production of your blogs know their roles and have access to your content calendar. There’s nothing worse than writing a blog, sending it off and then never hearing about it again. A content calendar helps ensure that everything goes smoothly.
You should:
- Plan a regular publishing schedule (weekly, bi-weekly, whatever works). Google likes a regularly updated blog.
- Prepare for seasonal content, incorporating relevant topics depending on the time of year.
- Ensure you have a nice variety of blog posts, including how-tos, industry insights, interviews and more.
Avoid relying on AI
Google are cracking down on AI content, penalising businesses that are pumping out loads of low-effort, low-quality content.
AI can be a useful tool, however we highly recommend only using it to help generate ideas, or to help you phrase certain parts of your blogs.
Want to have a specialist human plan, craft, write and publish your blogs for you? Get in touch with our content marketing specialists today for a no-obligation chat about your new blog strategy.
Writing your blog – 4 tips for businesses looking to write better blogs
This is it – the moment you’ve been waiting for – showtime!
When writing your blog, it’s important to keep your audience in mind at all times. Decide on a tone of voice and stick with it, and make sure you remain consistent throughout.
Craft compelling headlines
Great headlines = more clicks.
It’s a simple science. Ensure that your headlines are:
- Attention grabbing – Use power words, puns and numbered lists to cut through the noise and make sure your headlines stand out from the crowd.
- SEO-friendly – Always include your primary keywords in your headlines.
- Clear and concise – Your headlines should accurately reflect the post, but should also not exceed 50-60 characters. Titles longer than this will not display correctly on Google.
Carefully structure your posts
There’s nothing more off-putting than a blog that is written in huge, unbroken paragraphs.
Generally speaking, your paragraphs should be kept under 100 words. Less is more in this instance. Shorter paragraphs are more easily digestible for your audience. Hefty paragraphs can be somewhat intimidating for a reader.
Have a look at this blog. You’ll notice that we’ve kept the paragraphs short and ensured that each point is kept concise.
Furthermore, you should adhere to a relatively strict overall blog structure of:
- Introduction – Say hi, outline what the blog is about and ensure that the reader feels nice and comfortable with you as their host.
- Body – Break all your body text down into subheadings. This makes it far easier for a reader to digest and allows them to jump to the points that interest them the most.
- Conclusion – ALWAYS sign off with a concrete conclusion. Include links to further reading should they want it and let the reader know how they can get in touch for more information.
This structure is malleable and can change depending on your needs, but it’s best practice to have some structure in every blog.
Write quality content
Write blogs that people actually want to read.
If a topic doesn’t provide useful, actionable information that addresses your audience’s needs, then it’s not worth writing.
You should also ensure that you’re offering unique insights and perspectives to differentiate your blog from competitors, after all, you are the leading experts in your field.
To help with quality control, we highly recommend that you get someone else in your company to read any blogs before you publish them. Ask them to be brutally honest with feedback, as you’ll get a much better product after amending!
Optimise all content for SEO
We’ve mentioned SEO a few times now, which isn’t surprising considering just how bloody important it is!
Learning how to naturally incorporate your primary and secondary keywords throughout a blog is a key skill for any writer (it takes a bit of practice, trust me!).
You’ll also want to follow other SEO best practices, including:
- Writing a metadescription of 155 characters. This is a brief summary of the blog that features your target keywords.
- Using external linking strategies to link to other relevant, credible external sources.
- Optimising all imagery using alt text and compressing images to improve load time.
Want to learn a little more about aligning your content marketing with your SEO? You’re in luck! Click here to give another one of our blogs a read.
How to promote your business’ blog
Once you’ve written a blog, you have two options:
- Upload it to your website, cross your fingers and pray to the Google gods.
- SHARE, SHARE, SHARE
(Option 2 is better).
Here’s how to intelligently promote your business’ blog:
Social media
You should be active on relevant social media channels. You’re missing out if not.
Regularly share your blog posts on social media with engaging captions, and make sure to respond to any comments and interact with your followers to build a community.
Sometimes, social media can feel like shouting into a void, but don’t let a slow start put you off. Many prospective customers will vet your business by looking at your social media channels, so even if they’re not commenting or following, they are 100% watching what you put on your social channels.
Email marketing
Email is a direct line to your customers’ inbox. Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that email marketing is dead… You’re not one of them, we hope!
Don’t worry if you are, we hope this revitalises your interest!
You should be sharing blogs in carefully crafted, engaging emails. Send them to prospects, send them to your customers and send them to anyone who will listen. If your content is of a high quality, people will want to read it.
If you send out a regular newsletter, feature your blogs there, too. Keep shouting from the rooftops and people will begin to pay attention.
Influencer outreach
Many industries have a suite of influencers who love sharing content.
While this isn’t applicable to every business, it is an important avenue to consider. Identify potential; influencers who align with your brand, partner with influencers to promote your blog content and offer to write guest posts for influencer blogs to help you reach a wider audience.
Influencer outreach is much more common in B2C businesses.
Paid promotion
You have a wide variety of paid promotion options when it comes to promoting your blog:
- Social ads – Social advertising allows you to reach audiences on your socials that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. You can either sponsor an existing post about your blog, or you can create display ads specifically designed to pique interest and stop scrolling.
- Google Ads – Google (and Bing) Ads are another good way to promote your blog, especially as you can be extremely precise with your targeting, ensuring that you’re getting in front of the people that you really want to speak to.
- Sponsored content – Collaborate with other websites to publish sponsored blog posts. This may be via guest posting or by featuring in a journal. Encourage backlinks from reputable names and watch as your blog traffic grows!
Analysing and improving your business’ blog
Blog writing isn’t a case of popping it on your website, dusting off your hands and going out for lunch.
Successful blogging continues well after posting. You need to understand which blogs are performing well, which ones aren’t and what can be done to improve your blog content (both new and old).
Tracking metrics
You should be using tools such as Google Analytics to track the number of visitors to your blog, any comments, shares and the average time spent on your pages.
Not only this, but you should be able to track the number of leads generated by your blog content, so any clicks on your CTAs and whether they converted over time.
Analysing performance
The above metrics will allow you to better understand how your blogs are performing. You’ll start to learn what kind of blogs perform best and why that is.
You can also gather qualitative feedback from your readers through comments and surveys, learning a little more about what it is they enjoy reading.
Finally, you want to analyse how well your blogs are performing when compared to your competitors. Are you outranking them on search engines? Are your blogs more up to date with the latest information?
Continuous improvement
Only 38% of bloggers update their older articles – this is a mistake, as Google LOVES it when you update older articles with newer information.
So, once you’ve got your metrics and you’ve analysed your ongoing performance, it’s time to start updating your content:
- Update old posts with new information and SEO improvements (keywords change over time).
- Test out different types of content, headlines and CTAs to see what works best (you can A/B test if you want to be really sure about what works).
You should also keep your skills sharp. Stay updated on the latest blogging trends and SEO best practices and refine your writing skills as you improve over time.
And there you have it – you’re a certified blog writing master now!
That’s an awful lot of information all about writing blogs, well done for getting to the end!
It’s okay if you feel a little overwhelmed – we get it. It’s very hard to know where to get started.
That’s exactly why most SMEs and growing enterprises choose to partner with a content marketing agency rather than handle blog writing themselves.
Fortunately, you’re in the right place! Catalyst are a digital marketing agency with a focus on delivering tangible ROI to each and every client.
We have a team of content specialists who will work closely with you. It’s our job to learn everything there is to know about your business, industry and target audience. Your dedicated content team will formulate a complete, bespoke content marketing plan, designed specifically to meet your objectives, whether you’re looking to grow your business, generate more leads or build your brand, we can form a content strategy to suit.
When you’re ready to meet with a member of our content team, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a no-obligation chat. We’ll only ever suggest a partnership if it’s in the best interests of your business.
