You might be asking yourself: why should I keep a company blog? What benefits does it have? Maintaining a company blog can have an immense return on investment because it will build trust between you and your customer and establish you as an expert in your industry. Plus, once you’ve gained trust and visibility, your readers can easily become customers.
Building trust and authority takes time, which is why business blogging is a long game that requires commitment. While you can always hire a team of marketing experts to help you out with your company blog and other initiatives, refer to this guide if you’re looking to set on the blogger journey solo!
This article will walk you through the three stages of writing a blog and explain the best way to plan, write, and promote your blog posts.
Before writing – how to generate good blog ideas
What makes a good blog? What does valuable content even mean? Valuable or quality content is content which provides the reader with useful information. Often, valuable content answers one of two types of questions:
- Commonly asked questions
- Unanswered questions
The beauty of generating blog ideas is that it is incredibly easy to do when you know your customers. You’ve already heard their questions millions of times (commonly asked questions), and you’ve even thought about things they should know (unanswered questions). You know what they struggle with and what they value. Now it’s just a matter of getting the answers out on paper! Think of your blogs as answers to your customers’ problems.
As you’re brainstorming blog topics, consider storing them in a blog calendar. We recommend keeping one because it helps to keep track of your ideas and inspire further content creation.
There are plenty of free applications you can utilize that already have templated calendars (such as Airtable), but you can easily create and customize your own calendar in Google Drive or Microsoft Excel.
Writing – how to write valuable blogs
Find your voice
What is your company voice? This is something you might have figured out during what we like to call the Discovery phase of your branding journey. If you can’t concisely define your brand voice, think about how your customers speak. Are they casual and conversational? Are they business-oriented and formal? If your clientele consists of CEOs, you won’t want your writing style geared towards teenagers. The point being: know your audience. Know how they speak, what they talk about, and what is important to them.
Outline
The outline phase is a good time to brainstorm and create an overall structure for your blog. While this step isn’t necessary, it can be incredibly helpful to get your thoughts down on paper before diving in. If you’re someone who needs a little foundational structure, then create outlines.
Keep your outlines simple and include bullet points of your main messages. Then, add sub-bullet points of the examples and links you’d like to include within each of your main points.
Here is an easy template you can follow:
Awesome Blog Title:
- What can the reader gain from the blog?
- Main Point 1
- Explanation
- Example
- Main Point 2
- Explanation
- Example
- Main Point 3
- Explanation
- Example
- Conclusion
- Sum up all points
- Call to action
Write
The key to writing is letting go of judgment. Remember: no one will see your first draft, so let it all out. Write down everything you can think of on the topic and don’t worry about the voice. Just let it flow. It’s better to work your way down and condense later than doubt yourself at every sentence.
Take a breather
You know what’s just as important as letting the writing flow? Taking a break from it! Give yourself a few hours to a few days before revising. A fresh view will put things into perspective and give you a more precise idea of how to arrange the content. So, take a break!
Revise and Proofread
Revision is when you can hone in on condensing the content and making sure the voice is consistent throughout the blog. Make sure your message is coming across as clearly as possible and be aware of technical jargon. If you use industry terms that your customers aren’t familiar with, always define them.
After that, proofread! Read through your blog once or twice to check for typos, commonly misspelled words, and run-on sentences. If you don’t have a knack for grammar, don’t worry. Utilize tools such as Grammarly to help you out with simple misspellings and sentence structure clean-up. Even better, ask a colleague or a friend to proofread for you.
Finally, always fact check – a quick Google search gets the job done. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to publish!
After writing – how to increase visibility
Finally, optimize the blog by utilizing tags, meta descriptions, and other popular SEO tricks. Then, share it on social media. The more clicks your blog receives, the more discoverable it is, the more people it helps, and the more brand awareness you establish.
Maintaining a well-regarded blog can have serious ROI; take advantage of it now. The best thing you can do as a business owner is to utilize every part of marketing, including content marketing, to drive leads to your website. Combining a highly valuable and well-regarded blog with a content marketing plan and an SEO strategy can help maximize your business’s online visibility. If you’re looking for content marketing help or have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at info@trubrandmarketing.com
