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In this presentation learn about how writing blogs and articles can help your business, and get some valuable hints and tips to hone and sharpen your skills as a writer.
Key learning outcomes:
Hi, I'm Susie O'Shea. I'm a writer, speaker, and presenter. I've been writing and editing for nearly 10 years now, and I'm going to be taking you through, writing blogs and articles and how that can help your business. I’ll also provide a few tips on how to really hone and sharpen your skills as a writer.
What are we covering today:
I hear from a lot of different people that - given the nature of their businesses - they don't necessarily need to blog. Let’s look at different reasons as to how blogging can help you, regardless of what industry you're in.
Firstly, you get to establish a relationship with your customer base. Think of your blogs as little episodes into the life of your business. Who you are, who your staff is, how it is that you all work together, and how you all contribute on a larger scale to not just your business, but also the community at large as well. This will help get you a more professional credibility within the marketplace, and also keep you at top of mind when people, when it comes time to people needing your service or products.
It's also an opportunity for you to provide your expertise in a way that makes it interesting for people to understand a little bit more about what it is that you do.
It's an opportunity to reach more customers and improve your SEO. Now SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you were to maintain a consistent blog as part of your website- what that does is it helps search engines, such as Google to recognize your website and rank you higher when people Google things, such as “painter in Redcliffe”. If you're a painting business.
If you continue to have blog posts, you update your website with those, Google will recognise your website and give you a better ranking through that SEO, the search engine optimisation. So if nothing else, this is a great reason to start blogging and to maintain that consistency with the posts that you publish.
Now, before we start going into the writing process, something to think about and do a little bit of research into is, what is your brand voice?
A great place to start with this is to have a look, and do a little bit of research into, who are your competitors in the marketplace, who are people that offer very similar services and products to you? What are they about? What is their brand personality? And then what is it that makes you unique? What is the point of difference that makes you stand out from the rest of the crowd?
Once you've got that information, write down a couple of keywords (1-5 keywords). Keep them handy next to your computer or in your office. When it comes to doing your writing and writing your articles and your blogs, and keep referencing back to what those points are to establish what we call a voice.
So this is going to be your brand personality and what you really want to do is inject that brand personality and that tone of voice through all of the communications that you have. So that's not only in the blogs and articles, but also in the communication when you are putting these blog posts out there on your social media.
Try to maintain that consistency. This will grow as your business grows. It's not something that's static, it's something that will evolve and change as your business changes, but also as the marketplace changes as well. So really finding out what those key points of difference are. What it is that makes you stand out from the crowd and using that to your advantage.
Infuse as much of your personality into it as you can. Obviously, the business is your own. You've created that business and a big part of you is your own personality. Try and stay true to that, and incorporate, and infuse all of those things into the writing style that you have.
You can use a formal writing style or an informal writing style, depending on the audience that is that you're trying to reach and the tone of all the brand personality that you have created, and making sure that it all remains consistent through that.
So let's have a look at some of the basics of writing. How can we make you a better writer? Perhaps you've never written anything before. I can appreciate that the whole process may be a little bit daunting for people that have never done it before.
The very first piece of advice I could offer anybody who wants to become a better writer is to read, read, read, and then read a little bit more. Reading is so important and so vital to improving your writing because it opens you up to a variety of different subject matters. And when I say reading, it can be anything. It can be magazine articles. It can be books, fiction, non-fiction, blog, posts of other businesses, businesses that don't even pertain to your own business. What this does is it gives you more subject matter. Things that might generate some ideas that you wouldn't have necessarily thought about before. Get those ideas and write down some notes somewhere so you can go back to them later.
The second thing that a lot of reading does is it exposes you to a variety of different writing styles. So you might read something - again it doesn't matter what the subject matter is - and there's a certain way in which the article is written. That writing style really speaks to you, and you’re very receptive to that particular writing style. Borrow that. Use that in your own writing style. The more you read, the more exposure you have to different writing styles, the more you'll be able to create your own unique voice. So this is why reading is so important and it's such a great tool to help really improve your writing.
Now the second thing that will really help you is to embrace the power of storytelling.
Readers are far more receptive to storytelling psychologically than we are to just being bombarded with a bunch of facts. If there's something that you really want to get across, think of having a sit down with a friend at a pub over a beer, how are you going to communicate that message to them?
It might be a very casual chat that you have. Whatever it might be. What you'll find is it's usually injected with a lot of emotion, a lot of passion, a lot of feeling around whatever it is that you're trying to tell in that story. That's what makes it compelling.
If you were to take that art of storytelling into your blog post, regardless of what it's about, it will make for a more compelling article or blog post that people will be engaged in, and will want to read. And more so, will want to pass on to other people to read. So try and keep that in the back of your mind as well.
You may not always be able to use this storytelling methodology with everything that you're writing. If you are writing about something that is quite data driven, that's absolutely fine. What you can do is think of a time where you have used this particular process, whatever it might be, and use that as a story to illustrate whatever the data driven content might be. So this is another way to make your articles more compelling and more readable.
Planning your post is really important. I understand that for people that have never written before, this idea of the process of writing can be incredibly overwhelming. What planning does is it gives your article a little more structure and it also breaks down the “overwhelm” of writing.
Think about all the topics that you want to write about. Put together a list of all of the articles that you want to get out there and publish at a later date. You might not get around to them all. It doesn't matter. Just write them down. Keep them somewhere, and they can be a checklist for you to go through later on.
Once you've decided on a topic that you want to write about, do some research. I think one of the things I love the most about my job and being a writer is that I'm always in a position to continuously learn more about everything. I will come across topics that I've written about, that I don't know a thing about. Then I'll do some research and I'll find it really interesting, and I get lost into my research bubble and it's great. It's such a learning process. Do some research about what it is that you're writing.
If you do come across a website where you've gotten some information from that you're using for your blog, copy and paste the link to that website and hyperlink it as part of your article. I'm not going to go too much into SEO. I have included a link in this if you do want to read a little more about it. But if you do include more hyperlinks within your article, and your blog posts, that will also increase your SEO and the traffic that you get through that.
Once you've done your research and you've got your topic, break it down into sections. This makes it a lot easier to read, but what it also does is it breaks down this huge, quite scary, overwhelming process of writing an article, into small achievable little goals and things that you can write about. This will make the whole process a whole lot easier and more workable for you to be able to work in.
Speaking of the reader, You might share your article and people will click on it to read it. They open it up and they see that perhaps the writing is too small, or the font color is really difficult to read on the backdrop, or it's just a big chunk of words that's not necessarily broken up into readable sections. These are all things that are going to put the reader off from actually reading your blog post.
Please keep that in mind when you're formatting, putting the blog posts together and having some kind of a narrative through what it is that you're writing. That makes it easy for the reader to go from this step, to that step, to that step.
Where you can try and have a call-to-action at the end of the article. For example:
“If you like what you read, share this”
“If you want more information, give us a call for a quote”
Whatever that call to action might be, try and include that in the article itself, as well as the post that you're writing to further get your blog posts out there.
Wherever you can, try and add some value. What that means is, whatever it is that you're offering, the expertise that you have in your business, include that in your article. This is what's going to get people to really be interested in the blog posts that you produce in the future, because they know that by reading it, they're going to learn something.
When I say “add value”, it doesn't just have to be what it is that you offer as a business. It can be about who you are, and the people that are behind the business. In Moreton Bay we're very proud of where we live, and who we are. As an extension of that, we want to support people in our region as much as we can.
When I say, “add value”, talk about who you are, what made you want to start this business? Who are the people that work for you? What are the contributions that you're making to this region? Why should people give you the support that you're wanting from them?
Now, listicles are quite contentious amongst writers. They either love them or they hate. Readers as well - they love them or they hate them. Regardless of how you feel about them, two things.
It's going to rank really well with your search engine optimisation and do wonders for your ranking within the search engine.
It’s a good tool to use, because it gives you that readability that we talked about, and it gives you the structure, which makes it easy for you to plan the actual blog post or article.
Writing is a learnable skill. The more you write, the better you become at it. One thing I encourage you to do is when you're looking at different topics to write about, try and find things that are of interest to you. If you're interested about what you're writing about the whole process is going to be a lot easier. If you're writing about something that you have no interest about at all, it becomes a laborious task. You're not going to want to do it. It probably won't help your writing in the future. So really try and stick to things that you find interesting that you want to learn more about as well. That's going to help this whole process along and eventually make you a better writer.
When it comes to editing after you finished your glorious piece. I have what's called a 24 hour rule. I walk away from whatever it is that I've written for at least 24 hours. This gives me time and space from what I've written, before I go back and edit it.
The reason for that is the writing process can be quite consuming. You get so immersed in what it is that you're writing, and all you're really thinking about is creating the content. This means you're not going to pay a lot of attention to the grammar or the spelling or the sentence structure and things like that.
Give yourself time away from it all to come back to it with fresh eyes, and a fresh mind, where you're only looking at editing and picking up on those mistakes, and then go through and edit all of those errors.
Please don't be put off if there are a lot of errors. Even the most seasoned of writers will come across a multitude of errors in whatever it is that they write. It does not mean you're a bad writer. If anything, it means that you're so into creating the content, which is great. But you may not have been giving as much attention to the grammar, which is fine.
If you've got someone who hasn't seen the content at all, there'll be in a much better position to be able to edit that for you. If you're in a position financially, you can outsource and get it edited professionally, that's another option that you have. But it is really important to give yourself time away from what you’ve written before you edit.
Now we've researched all of the topics. We have added a whole bunch of hyperlinks. We've learnt a lot. We've put together this beautiful piece of writing. We've edited. It. It looks amazing. It's time to get it out there for everybody to read and get some customers through the door.
There are several different platforms that you can use to market your website and your blog posts accordingly.
Facebook is really easy. You can just add the website link. With all of these platforms, be sure to think of a quite short description of what the article is so that people will click on it to open it and read it. Include that in your social media post with a link to the blog post now.
As we said before, if you can include a call-to-action in your articles, do the same thing on social media, regardless of the platform that you choose, have a call-to-action. For example, on Facebook you can ask readers to click, like, share, or comment.
Twitter is also fantastic, not only for sharing your blog personal links, but also for following other people that are in your profession or within your industry - both domestically and overseas. It's a great place to see how other people are promoting their business. That's what this is all about is borrowing ideas and making them your own. LinkedIn is a great place as well to share your business wins as well as your blog posts.
When you start thinking about a social media campaign try and link as many different elements into this campaign as possible. What I mean by that is you've written a blog post. Fantastic. See if you can tie that into perhaps an event that you've got coming up; a sale, or something special that the business is doing. Writing a blog post about that will give an extra layer of depth to this campaign.
Instagram is another one that's a great tool to use to get your blog posts out there. Given that Instagram is mainly focused on imagery, try and use some images of your products, services, your staff, or the area that your business is in. All of these things that are going to grab attention of your target market and the audience that you want to reach. With Instagram, I do suggest including a link to the blog post that you've written in your bio, and actually saying that in the post, for example “to read this article, click on link in bio”.
So these are great tools that you can use to get your messages out there and to try and get as much traction of that blog post as you can.
I have included a bunch of helpful links that I think will really help you in finding out a little bit more about certain topics that you may have been interested in that I didn't have time to cover here today. Please download the presentation to see these links.
Thank you for joining me for this presentation on writing blogs. Good luck and happy writing.