Unless you have an effortless funnel of perfect customers landing on your doormat at regular and manageable intervals you will know that you need to be blogging as part of your marketing strategy. A regular blog is a brilliant tool for many reasons. It does lovely stuff to your SEO, providing your website with up to date and relevant content. It shows you to be an authority in your field, which in turn increases people’s trust in you, and helps you to remain in their mind till the time that they are ready to buy. It also provides you with content to populate your other areas of marketing such as your newsletter, and your social media feeds. All in all, one piece of writing, can be re-worked to provide a great range of marketing potential. And this is even before we get onto repurposing your content into podcasts, webinars etc.
So, you know you need a blog, but how do you go about writing one?
Top 5 tips from the Aardvarks:
1: Schedule your blog into your working week, treat it as a job, not as an optional extra. For blogs to be effective they need to be regular, so pick a frequency that you can achieve, a regular weekly or bi-weekly blog is a good starting point.
2: Make sure you know your audience. Your blog needs to be pitched at the correct level and needs to offer your readers value. A blog may be free to read, but you are asking people to take the time to read it, and your customer’s time has a value.
3: Write a good headline. It needs to be informative, concise and captivating. It needs to make people want to read the rest of your blog, and it needs to be accurate.
4: Make sure you structure your blog. This has two advantages. Firstly, it will help you to write it. I write an opening paragraph to capture the attention of my readers (hopefully) and then the message that I want to share, then a final paragraph or sentence with a call to action. Secondly it will help your readers to follow your thoughts, and enable you to encourage a further action, be it to simply sign up to your newsletter, or view another page on your website.
5: Just write. Simply start writing. Don’t worry if it’s not good to start with, you can always edit it. Also remember Mark Zuckerberg’s famous quote “Done is better than perfect.”
To keep up to date with the latest Aardvark news and blogs, sign up to our newsletter by completing the form on the right of this page
Lizzie