We all know blogging can be a huge SEO tool for your website, right? But between hiring, training, HR duties, customer relations, developing new products and so on, this can take a backseat more often than it should. So today I am going to share with you the 10 ways to write a successful blog while running your company.
- Decide on the months’ worth of titles
- Create the folders/sub folders for them
- Start all 4 blogs by adding the title to a word doc
- Research any supporting articles or materials you will want to reference, save to notepad or Evernote
- Schedule your writing day away from any distractions – write all 4 blogs in one day
- Optional – Send to editor (should take about 3 days to receive back)
- Look for images to go with your blog subject
- Schedule blogs to post once per week
- Share to social media
- Send in an email blast
1) Decide on the months’ worth of titles
You know the WHY behind blogging, it is just the how and when that are causing you a bit of stress. For me, batch creating is always helpful, meaning, sit down and spend one hour, one day per month and outline all the blogs you want to write for the month and for me, I just go ahead and open WORD and write the titles on a new document and save it to a file I keep on my desk called “Shit I Am Writing”.
2) Create the folders/sub folders for them
Inside that folder I will have another folder nested that is labeled “February/2021” and then inside of that file will be 2 other nested files RAW and EDITED. You may find another way to keep yourself organized on what you are currently writing and what is complete. Once a blog is completed and posted to my website, I move that entire folder to another file labeled “POSTED”.
3) Start all 4 blogs by adding the title to a word doc
So now, if you opened my February/2021 folder you would see four word docs with four different titles on them and nothing else.
4) Research any supporting articles or materials you will want to reference, save to notepad or Evernote
Now I have the titles to the blogs I want to write, but nothing else, so I begin doing some research on these titles and I will use Evernote to grab links to other articles that I may want to reference as well as some of my past blogs that may have some relevance to the piece that I am writing, so that I can have some good backlinks for added SEO.
5) Schedule your writing day away from any distractions – write all 4 blogs in one day
Once I have done that, I schedule one day to complete all four blogs. There is nothing else on my schedule except writing, and I make sure I am not at my office for this batching process as I would have far too many distractions to get this completed. In this article, the key word is also FOCUS. You must get rid of the distractions and just pump out content.
I do use my mood do decide which will be first, but other than that, I have already decided on the flow of these blogs.
Now start writing.
Finish one before you take a break and regroup. I usually go back to my Evernote lists and read through the supporting material I found before I start writing, this helps me to formulate the flow of the piece. Then I decide which links I think will be relevant and build them into the article.
When you are done writing the article, reread it. Is it something you would read to the end? If not, then consider what would make it better and then fix it.
6) Optional – Send to editor
When you have all four blogs finished and you are happy with them, send them to an editor. If you are confident in your writing skills, you can skip this. I, however; always do this, because I write like I speak, and it is usually a mess. I have found an amazing editor on Fiverr and he works magic with my words, he even restructures my sentences.
If you don’t have an account with them yet, use this link and set yourself up.
My editor is on there and if you want to use him too, this link will get you there, we have worked together for years and he always delivers a great product at a fair pride, plus he makes me look good.
7) Look for images to go with your blog subject
Once I have released my blogs to the editing gods, I start searching for images for the blogs. There are free image options like Pixabay and Pexels, I like both of these for crisp clean images that will make your article come to life.
After I have selected the perfect images, I will put them in the folders I have created for each blog. I am usually looking for 5 images, one for a header and 4 that will be relevant during the reader’s journey, so be mindful of how the image is laid out, vertical or horizontal. For example, if in the middle of my blog I am mentioning some books that I am currently reading, I will find a picture of a stack of books for that portion of the story, this just helps the readers eye to travel to the different parts of the article.
Your header will need to be a horizontal image, while the other images can be either.
Once I have all of the images that I think I want, then I make sure they are sized right for my website. The exact size you will need can vary depending on your website or your blogging platform, but for my WordPress site, my header is 700×400 and my additional images are 600×600, you can see how this all pulls together, and I think the images really help the reader follow along.
Once you have the images you want you can use a tool like Canva to resize them for the website. Canva is a free tool with some paid options, but there is a lot you can do on the free version and it can really open up your creative side.
8) Schedule blogs to post once per week
OK! Now you have the blog back from the editor and your images are the right size, now it is time to determine your posting schedule. Ideally, I like a blog post per week, but this is up to you and what you believe you can sustain. Add the schedule to your calendar and get the first one posted.
9) Share to social media
You can also use Canva to create word tiles that have quotes from your blog on them. Size them for whichever social media platform you are going to use to promote your blog and then you can grab your blog link and a word tile and post to Facebook, Pinterest or LinkedIn. Make sure to add the word tile first when sharing to social media platforms because if you add the link first it will populate a preview of the website post instead of the image you want displayed.
In this article, we talk about how to use social media to help you stand out, but social can also help your blogs stand out and drive traffic to your website too!
My normal practice is to pull 5 quotes from every blog and then duplicate on different sized posts for each platform.
10)Send in an email blast
Next, if you have a subscriber or email list, you can push the blog out in an email, this is a good way to stay in front of the people who are interested in you or your company.
I really do enjoy writing but if I don’t stick with this list, I get way behind and off track.
I hope you find this useful and if you have any great blogging tips, share them with all of us!
Happy writing!
Robin Wilson is the co-owner of SCP Agency.
She is a self-proclaimed social media guru and specializes in social marketing for auto dealerships. She has also been instrumental in teaching auto dealerships how to market through social media to their existing database and shows them how to make sure that they do not become victims of conquest marketing. She is a marketing coach to all and has become a leader in Facebook marketing strategies in the U.S.
