You've probably heard how paramount blogging is to the success of your marketing. Without it, your SEO will tank, you'll have nothing to promote in social media, you'll have no clout with your leads and customers, and you'll have fewer pages to put those oh-so-valuable calls-to-action that generate inbound leads. Need I say more?
So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can't consistently blog? Maybe because, unless you're one of the few people who actually like writing, business blogging kind of stinks. You have to find words, string them together into sentences, and ughhh where do you even start?
Well my friend, the time for excuses is over. After you read this post, there will be absolutely no reason you can't blog every single day -- and do it quickly. Not only am I about to provide you with a simple blogging formula to follow, but I'm also going to give you free templates for creating five different types of blog posts:
- The How-To Post
- The List-Based Post
- The Curated Collection Post
- The SlideShare Presentation Post
- The Newsjacking Post
Click here to download our free blog post templates and learn how to write 5 different blog posts.
With all this blogging how-to, literally anyone can blog as long as they truly know the subject matter they're writing about. And since you're an expert in your industry, there's no longer any reason you can't sit down every day and hammer out an excellent blog post.
Writing a Blog Post: A Simple Formula to Follow
1) Understand your audience.
Before you start to write, have a clear understanding of your target audience. What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? This is where creating your buyer personas comes in handy. Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests while you're coming up with a topic for your blog post.
For instance, if your readers are Millennials looking to start their own business, you probably don't need to provide them with information about getting started in social media -- most of them already have that down. You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their approach to social media from a more casual, personal one to a more business-savvy, networking-focused approach. That kind of tweak is what separates you from blogging about generic stuff to the stuff your audiencereally wants (and needs) to hear.
2) Start with a topic and working title.
Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start with. For example, if you're a plumber, you might start out thinking you want to write about leaky faucets. Then you might come up with a few different working titles -- in other words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing. For example, you might decide to narrow your topic to "Tools for Fixing Leaky Faucets" or "Common Causes of Leaky Faucets." A working title is specific and will guide your post so you can start writing.
Let's take a real post as an example: "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post." Appropriate, right? The topic, in this case, was probably simply "blogging." Then the working title may have been something like, "The Process for Selecting a Blog Post Topic." And the final title ended up being "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post."
See that evolution from topic, to working title, to final title? Even though the working title may not end up being the final title (more on that in a moment), it still provides enough information so you can focus your blog post on something more specific than a generic, overwhelming topic.
3) Write an intro (and make it captivating).
We've written more specifically about writing captivating introductions in the post, "How to Write an Introduction [Quick Tip]," but let's review, shall we?
First, grab the reader's attention. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs -- or even sentences -- of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they've given your post a fair shake. You can do this in a number of ways: tell a story or a joke, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.
Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives.
4) Organize your content.
Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information -- for the readerand the writer. The trick is to organize the info so readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. The organization can take multiple forms -- sections, lists,
