You know blogs bring in more leads, so you have decided to write your own business blog. But where do you start? By figuring out what you are going to write about.
As this is a business blog, I assume you have a website and somewhere to post your blog once you have written it and that you know who you are writing your blog for.
Why are you writing a business blog?
Business blogs usually have a few purposes:
- To inform, entertain and educate
- To bring traffic to your website (that means more potential customers)
- To generate more sales
- To increase brand awareness
- To appear higher up on Google
Your blog is an opportunity to do all of these things! Remember, you are writing something your customers want to read, and they will only read it if it’s interesting.
Make sure you don’t scatter-gun and write about everything and anything. Your customers probably don’t care that Brenda moved from Admin to HR.
You need a strategy when deciding what to write about.
Choose keywords and keyphrases
You will have heard a lot of hype about keywords. This simply means choosing select words and phrases to talk about consistently. This helps Google understand what you sell or do.
If you were a pet business, for example, you are unlikely to rank for words like ‘Dog food’ and ‘Cat toys’ initially unless you have a huge budget and a well-established website. Aside from the words on your page, Google also uses your ‘Domain Rating’ to decide where to show you in searches. Your domain rating depends on how trustworthy and credible your website is. They use a complicated matrix to determine this, but it matters.
Your best bet with a new business blog is to target slightly longer words. You can use Google Keyword Planner to do some free keyword research, and you will find plenty of tutorials on YouTube to help with this.
Essentially, you need to choose 2-3 main keywords and about 10-20 additional keywords and phrases to focus on.
If you need help selecting these words for your keyword research, here are some ideas…
Do some competitor research
It is important to check out the competition. What are they writing about? There is a reason these blogs have made it to page one, and success leaves clues (this is called reverse engineering).
What questions or keywords/phrases might your customers be typing into Google to find you? Type these into Google and check out the competition.
- Which blogs and websites show up?
- What are these companies writing about?
- How many words do their blogs have?
- Do they sell the same things as you?
I would never advocate copying blogs, but it is important to unpick your competitors’ strategies and build your own content calendar using this information.
Think about what your customers want to hear about
Think about your own customers and the questions they ask you on a regular basis. You can also find out how potential customers think by using social media. Not just your own social media but competitors and sites like Reddit and Quora.
There is an awesome tool called Perplexity AI which allows you to search questions and topics and it finds the threads from these chat sites. You can use these to see what people are asking in relation to the type of services you offer or products you sell.
If something comes up and you think you could provide a 500-word answer that adds value and answers the question, add it to your list of topics.
And now, the final piece of the planning puzzle…
Create a content calendar
Whilst gathering all of the information, it helps to make a plan of the blog topics you are going to write about and when you are going to publish them, this is known as a Content Calendar. Ideally you would post two blogs a month but one is better than none.
If you have time, I would always advise writing your business blog yourself and if you would like to learn my exact strategy, I can teach you. So book a call with me if you want to find out more.
Once you have your keywords, turn them into specific blog titles
The more specific you can be with your blog while Google learns what you sell or do, the better. Every piece of your blog needs to be linked directly to what you do or sell.
Here are some examples…
- If you run a pet-sitting business, you might write ‘What questions should I ask before choosing a pet sitter?’ or ‘7 tips for finding the right pet sitter for you.’
- If you sell dog ice cream, you might write, ‘Why do dogs enjoy dog-safe ice cream and where to buy it?’ or ‘Is ice cream safe for dogs?’
- If you sell raw cat food, you might write, ‘Should I feed my cat raw food?’ or ‘How to switch my cat over to raw food’.
Go forth and plan…
You have enough information to start researching your blog topics, generating keywords and phrases and creating a list of ideas. I will be releasing a blog shortly about how to write and structure your blogs so stay tuned for this!
