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Part 3d - Writing Blog Content

A business blog is only as good as the person who publishes it. There are a lot of great business blogs on the Internet. There are also plenty of duds. Launching a blog is the easy part. It's the constant addition of useful, interesting content that sets the good blogs apart from the duds.

As I've said before, what you write about is more important than how you write it. So as long as you publish useful and insightful information, nobody is going to care that you're not Faulkner or Hemmingway.

With that said, here are some tips for creating quality content for your business blog:

Blog Content Guidelines

• Write in your own voice. Don't try to impress people with your vocabulary. The best blogs convey quality information in a conversational style.
• Write each blog post so it can stand on its own, in addition to being part of your blog as a whole. Each post should offer value on an individual level.
• Include your key phrase in titles (when applicable) and throughout the body of your blog posts. Do this in a natural way -- avoid keyword overuse, or "stuffing."
• Link between blog posts as needed to help readers navigate and find related information. This also helps with search engine visibility.
• Whenever possible, use keywords in your hyperlinks to make them more descriptive for people and more effective for SEO.
• Include a brief call-to-action at the end of posts, when applicable. "To learn more about this new service, please email us at..."

Use a Content Plan for Blog Writing Success

Many times in the past, I've written about the search engine visibility benefits of using a business blog. Because of this, blog SEO (search engine optimization) is a popular topic among business bloggers. So here we go with another lesson on the SEO aspect of blogging.

In this lesson, I'll show you how to create a content plan to help you blog about topics important to your audience. First, you will identify the topics and integrate them into your blogging content plan. Then you will simply blog about them.

From a technical standpoint, blogging is easy. Because of this simplicity, you can grow your business blog steadily over time. Consistent growth and content volume are two of the top-five ranking factors with most major search engines.

But many bloggers find this notion intimidating. "What do I write about? Where do I come up with ideas? How can I possibly create a new blog post two or three times per week?"

Here's the good news. For most business blogs, the content and ideas already exist -- you just have to round them up and put them on paper. Here's how to use a keyword research tool to determine which topics are most important to your key audience.

Step 1. Identify Blog Theme
Start by identifying the main topic of your business blog. Usually, this will be related to your products or services. Write this main topic down on a piece of paper.

Step 2. Choose Keyword Tool
Now you will need to select a keyword / key phrase research tool. I use and recommend both WordTracker.com and KeywordDiscovery.com. There is a free version of WordTracker's tool available at http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

Step 3. Begin Key Phrase Research
Enter your main topic into the search tool and hit "Enter" -- or whatever button runs the report. In the example image below, I've used the topic / phrase "working capital." This topic is relevant to one of my client's businesses.

"Working capital" is one of their top-tier phrases, so I want to find out what kind of variations of that phrase people are searching for online. This will help me create a content plan for them so they can blog about all of the things their ideal audience is researching online. Makes sense, right?

Step 4. Create Spreadsheet
Once you generate a list of key phrases based on your main topic, copy the results into an Excel spreadsheet (the best program to use for this task). Then go through and delete any phrases / topics that are irrelevant to your business. Do the same with redundant phrases. The image below shows my cleaned up spreadsheet, with redundant and irrelevant phrases removed.

This list actually went on for dozens of phrases. I've truncated it here.

Step 5. Add Spreadsheet Columns
Now you can simply add a "completion" column to your spreadsheet, and mark each topic complete when you have written about it on your blog.

Step 6. Start Blogging
Next, look at each phrase and ask yourself, "How can I blog about this topic in order to (A) educate my target audience and (B) demonstrate the expertise within my company?" The spreadsheet represents the topics your audience wants to learn about, as indicated by their online search behavior. So give them what they want!

Step 7. Expand, Repeat and Vary
Now that you have blogged about topics important to your audience, what do you do next? You keep going, of course. You can continue the process by revisiting topics from a different angle, or by expanding your list of topics / phrases.

What's the Point?

This may seem like a lot of effort, but once you get going it's fairly simple and straightforward. But even if it were difficult, it would be worth the effort. Think about what you're doing here. You are creating a library of information that directly corresponds to the topics your audience wants to know about. You are laying the groundwork for future search engine visibility for a broad range of relevant phrases, and the traffic that comes with such visibility. And you are demonstrating your expertise on topics that are important to your audience. Now that's a smart way to use a blog!

So now you're writing new blog content on a regular basis. But what good is all that content if nobody knows it exists? This is where blog marketing comes into picture. And that's our next topic.