How to Write a Blog

“Content marketing is a commitment, not a campaign.”

– Jon Buscall

The humble blog post is the most misunderstood and underutilized tool in marketing. This article is how to turn your blog from a high-labour, low return, dust collecting frustration to a revenue engine to be proud of.

But first, how not to use a blog:

• It’s not about you: Don’t blog about your staff volunteering at the Food Bank, your business turning 30, or your next big sale. There’s a place for all those things, but it’s not a blog.
• Features & Benefits: This is a fine line between talking about a product in a useful way (ie how to take care of your orchid) and flat-out promoting it (ie no living room should be without one). The former will bring you ongoing loyalty, the latter will bring you a bounce and maybe an unsubscribe.
• Random Topics: All bloggers are guilty of it (including me), but it’s a bad habit that can form dangerously quickly. Effective blog posts are spokes to a strategic hub; take the time to design that hub.

Now that we have that out of the way, here are my top tips:

1) Keep it Strategic

Strategies are hard. The process takes a long time, we have to ask uncomfortable questions, and we’re often confronted with truths that challenge the assumptions that make our jobs easier. And if you get into blogging without a strategic process beforehand, it will probably fail (be unread, unengaged with, unprofitable).

Each blog topic is an alchemy between 3 elements: what your customer is asking, what is being searched for on Google, and what’s happening in-store. Take the time to build an Editorial Calendar (lots of free templates online) that blends these 3 and keep your spokes in lock-step with your hub.

Take the time. Discover your Personas, keyword-crunch your topics, and ask the hard questions about what your customers want to hear (spoiler alert: it’s not 20% off Petunias).

2) Keywords Matter:

If you write a blog in the forest and no one reads it, can it make you money? No. That’s why Google is the boss.

A keyword is your link between what people are searching for and what you’re publishing.

Here is your quick n’ dirty keyword process:

• Brainstorm all the topics you could write about. Arm yourself with lots of sticky notes and a whiteboard because you want at least 100.
• Google a “Free keyword planner” online. Punch in each topic (you may need to play with the terms). You’ll be able to see how many searches there were for that keyword or phrase.
• Choose 3 key phrases of the top 5-10 and make those your topic headers. Google looks for headers far more than text when it comes to matching with keywords.

You may be surprised at what you find. I was planning an article on Staghorn ferns and the keyword search revealed that the most common question wasn’t about care or variety, but whether they’re poisonous to cats. Simply addressing that question in one of my headers upped the article’s organic reach substantially and drove more people to my site.

3) Write like a Journalist:

Here’s some tough love: almost nobody reads your entire blog post. Most of us read online in an “F-pattern.” We read the first few sentences then scan down the left margin, dipping right into the text when something catches our eye.

In old-school newsrooms, journalists rarely knew how much of their story would be printed. So they had to give the Big-5 (who, what, when, where, and why) in the first few short paragraphs. “How” and context followed, and got more abstract (and expandable), as you read further.

Savvy blogs follow this format. Over half your reader won’t make it past the first 2 paragraphs, so get your key information in there. After that, you need to find ways to keep their attention flowing downwards.

Bold is a good way to draw the eye down, because we think it’s something important.

• And bullet points
• don’t hurt
• either

If you’re including a “call-to-action” (ie an ask for them to sign up to get your blogs in their inbox), keep it about a third of the way down the page. At the beginning it’s an obstacle, and at blog’s end no one will see it. A third down and you’ll get the people who are somewhat interested.