It’s safe to assume that we’ve all either read a blog or atleast heard of one at some point in time. Some of you might already have one for yourself or for your business and others may have thought about starting one.
There can be so many benefits to starting a blog, but the success you see with it will depend on if you’re doing it right. Overall the process of a blog is easy – if you have a topic of value to people, they will read it.
But where to even start or finding your niche can sometimes be hard. We’re here to share some tips with you on how to get your blog started.
Find your niche
You can pretty well find a blog about anything these days, so to get readers to your blog you need to have a niche. If you are in a fitness related business, focus your blog on fitness – home exercises, meal prep or even a gym playlist. If you own a lifestyle boutique, you might write about entrepreneurship, DIY’s or new trends. Whatever it may be, make sure that whatever you are writing about is specific to you and what you do. This will be the topic you are most knowledgeable about and to create a space filled with similar content will be beneficial to the reader.
Choose your platform
Finding the right platform can be hard, since there seems to be so many nowadays. If you already have a website, chances are you’ll be able to add a blog platform to your current website so you should be good to go. If you don’t – platforms like Wordpress or Squarespace are very user-friendly and good for blogs. They both have a step by step process to get set up, pick your theme, setup the back end nitty gritty and to post your first blog!
Consistency is key
From the get-go, decide on a realistic number of blog posts you can post per week or per month. Consistency is key when it comes to posting so make sure you pick a number you can complete. It’s easy to go big and post every other day at first when the creative juices are flowing but after a while you tend to burn out and your blog starts to lack quality. Try posting weekly or even twice a month – even if you have tons of ideas, you can add these to your content folder and you’ll be ahead in the planning department.
Promote and share
It can be difficult at first to get people to your site and read your blogs. As you post more and use the right keywords, you’ll organically grow on search engines. But until then, you’ll be deep within the pages almost impossible to find. This is why it’s important to use your social platforms to promote and share your blog. Use social media to get your followers directly to your blog – not only will it get people reading your content but the more people who are going to your site, the quicker you’ll grow on search engines.
Be casual
In most cases, blogs are casual. The structure of it is usually more personal with a conversational context. When someone is reading a blog, they are usually reading it because they want to learn about something or they relate to something and with that, you have to write as if you are having a casual conversation with that person. Don’t fill your blog with difficult words or acronyms for that matter – keep things simple and you’ll keep people reading.
Be relatable
Similar to being casual, you need to be relatable. People often read a blog because they are wanting to learn something the way someone has done it, they relate to the topic or they are personally interested in a topic – with that, it’s important to write from a personal perspective relating to others.
Keep it short
When you’re passionate about something (which you should be if you’re writing about it), it’s easy to write a lot about it – and as great as that is, you tend to lose people. The idea is to structure your blog with the main points you want to cover and write a few sentences to go along with it. Don’t be too repetitive and don’t go too into detail about something. On average, pending the topic of course, your blog should take about 5 minutes to read (1200 words or so). This all depends on the type of content you’re writing about and sometimes it could be more or less, but as a starting point – this is something to consider.
Keywords = a must
Blogs can definitely benefit your SEO. The more content you have on your site, the more content search engines have to ‘crawl’ your site and rank you. It’s one thing to write a lot of words but if they aren’t relevant to your business or what your site is about it defeats the purpose. Make sure your blog posts contain strong keywords relevant to you and your business. Search engines will pick these words up from your site and will rank it higher when someone is searching relatable words.
Starting a blog can seem like an easy thing to do – you have a topic, you write about it and bam… you post! Which, sure that can be true, but it’s important to ensure you are optimizing your blog to benefit your business and traffic to your site. These are a few tips and tricks to help you get started.
Do you have a blog? We’d love to check it out – leave a comment below with your blog link!
Need some help getting started? We’d be happy to help – send us a DM or email us at hello@mintandpoppy.com
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