We all know how important blogs are. When they done well, they help with search engine rankings, provide valuable content for customers and potential customers, help people to learn more about your business, provide content for social media, help to position your business as an industry expert and the list goes on and on. That being said, at Q Social Media we know that busy business owners may not always have the time to get the most out of blog writing, so we want to share with you our top 5 very simple blogging tips with you.
- Know your audience
Who are you trying to reach? What are their pain points and desires? Tailor your content to resonate with them, answer their questions and offer solutions through your blogs, and therefore your business. If you are struggling to come up with ideas for blogs, a huge tip is to have a very careful look through your reviews (which hopefully you are doing anyway). These could be testimonials that have been sent to you, Google and Facebook reviews and so on. Positive reviews will help you to understand what your customers want to see more of, which can help you to build up a list of blog topics. Also if you happen to have any negative reviews you can use these to truly understand your customers’ pain points and you can build topics around them too. Just as a side note, please always respond to reviews, good or bad to show customers that you are really listening.
2. Share your knowledge
Sharing your knowledge through a blog is a fantastic way to establish yourself as an expert, connect with your audience and even grow your business. It’s also a faster way to tackle blog writing, as it’s much quicker to write about subjects that you have knowledge on and are passionate about, and don’t need to spend a lot of time researching. The great thing about this? Not only it a quicker way to write blogs, but Google ranks websites that are written by experts very highly. So if your website has this function, be sure to publish yourself as the author of the blog each time.
3. Leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We actually talked about AI in this blog – 5 easy ways to start using AI in your digital marketing, and it’s a great way to help busy business owners with blogging in a few different ways:
- As a tool to brainstorm blog ideas
- To help with the structure of your blog
- To repurpose old blogs – simply paste your old blog in and see what AI applications like Gemini (previously Bard) come up with
As we mentioned in the last blog, please do not use AI to replace the human element of blog writing, simply use it to help you save time and to complement your work. Take ideas from it and put it into your own words.
4. Repurpose old blogs
Once you have published a blog, you don’t have to forget about it. In fact it’s almost a waste to leave it to get lost behind newer content. You can take older blogs and update them with new dates, information, statistics and insights, and anything else that may have changed throughout the blog. For example if you have a hotel and you blogged last year about the best things to do with the kids during half term in your area, why not use it again this year? Just be sure to change any dates and check all the links are still relevant and are working. Not only does this save you lots of time as you are not always having to write blogs from scratch, it also helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) as search engines love fresh content on websites.
You can repurpose old blogs in two ways. Either you can take the old blog and change the dates and old information (and don’t forget to change the published date in the back end of your website to now). Or you can leave the old blog where it is and you can take the ideas from the blog to write a new one quickly. This is a good option if your old blog is doing well and is still being searched for, but you’re struggling to come up with new content ideas. Lastly, you could even take a long blog and turn it into a few micro blogs, which takes us onto our next and final tip.
5. Embrace micro blogs
Turning an old longer blog into a few new micro blogs is a great idea for busy business owners. People don’t always have the time to read long blogs, so mixing up your content with some shorter blogs can work really well. So going back to the example of the half term blog you could take one of the top things to do and use it to create a micro blog on ‘our top attraction with the kids when it’s raining’ and focus on that one place from your list of things. You could quickly add some more information to pad it out and if you are really struggling with how short your micro blog looks on the page, you can add more images throughout to break up the wording. Your next micro blog leading up to half term week could be ‘top place to go with the kids when it’s sunny’, or ‘the best walk to do with the kids’ and so on.
We hope you found this blog useful, and just as a last little tip. Don’t forget to fill out the SEO section of your blogs in the back end of your website and use analytics to see which blogs are performing well and which blog topics are getting engagement on your social media channels, so you know what your audience is interested in seeing more of. We understand that even armed with knowledge, sometimes you just don’t have the time. So if you need expert help with your digital marketing, please get in touch with us at Q Social Media.
