Christina, Manager from Dolphin Outsourcing Ltd, is here again with another educational blog, this time about blogging.
Do you currently blog for your business? Have you ever written a blog before?
Christina will take you through the common questions and main parts of a blog and how to ensure it continues drawing traffic to your website after it has been posted.
Watch the video or read the transcript below to find out more.
If you have any questions or are looking for some business support, please get in touch with us, and we will be happy to help - https://www.dolphin-outsourcing.co.uk/. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel!
Today we are talking about blogging for your business.
Do you have a blog already?
Are you doing any kind of blogging at all for your business?
If you do, how many are you doing a month?
Do you have a certain amount?
I'd love to know more about how you’re getting on with blogging so far and what you're doing.
Why should my business be blogging?
You should be doing them for your business. It helps with SEO, this is the main reason people write blogs and it enables you to reach more people, helps you to promote yourself as a business and it works as a method for attracting an audience because it provides something of value to them before asking anything in return. This sort of goes out to your ideal audience. So you're doing all the blogs, and then your ideal audience will read those blogs, and then hopefully buy from you in return.
Where can I post my blogs?
Ideally, these should be on your website, where you're able to promote your products or services, whatever it is that you're offering and then they'll go to a blog and look what you're doing as well, once they've read your blog, they might go to different areas of the website and learn more about you and start to find out what you're selling or what you're doing. They might follow you on social media. So blogging is a really good way of getting that person into your business straight away.
How do I start a blog? What do I write about?
So the most popular subjects on what you should write about is your subject area. So depending on what you do as a business, but ones that really work well, I find, are like the top five of such and such, the top 10 of such and such or top 20 wherever it might be. So if you've got a product, you might want to base these around the type of products you do. So if you're a gift person, you might have a gift blog, you could do the top 10 plaques or something like that, if you’re selling plaques, and then you can put your plaques on there or you can offer someone else's products and tag them as well. There is so much you can do on that, but these ones work really well.
You can ask your audience as well. Ask your audience on social media, maybe do a poll, ask them what they'd like to know about. And then you'll start to get some feedback or ask your friends. Think about the blogs that you read yourself. So what are you most interested in? You can also kind of Google for some ideas and then collate a list of what to write about and start scheduling what you want to write or start drafting them.
How do I write a title for my blog?
The title is super important. So how can you come up with title ideas? One of the best ways to do this is super simple. Go to Google and start writing something to do with what your blog is about. It sounds a little bit too easy, but depending on what your business is, you just search "How to" or "Where can i" as these are common title starts for blogs. Then you'll see a drop-down under the search bar and you can have a look at what comes up, you'll get a ton of ideas. The suggestions that are at the top of that list, they're the ones you should be writing about because Google's finding those first. So, find the ones that work for you from the top searches.
Never copy anybody else's work. That is really important. So just keep that in mind, make it your own content, and post it on your own website and social media channels.
If you're still stuck for ideas, think about the questions your clients or your buyers normally ask you? What do people first message you about? You could do a blog specifically for frequently asked questions it helps a business as well. This could be shared on your main page you could have on your website. Other topic ideas couple be 'What are your prices?', 'Are your products are made with ....?', 'Are they cruelty-free?’ All questions like that you should be answering on your blog, and that should be on your website.
How do I format my blog?
Generally, and this is how we do it for ours, is the title and large header at the top. Underneath, it's good to have some kind of photo, or graphic or whatever it is that you would normally do. Try and keep it the same for each one, don't use the same photo, but the same layout, and the same style throughout that's consistent with your branding. A big one is people do a massive block of text and people get bored. If you space it out, it's going to be much easier for people to read and digest that information, and then follow the required call to action.
How do I find photos for my blog?
I would say use your own, ideally, if you already got your own photos, especially if you have your own products. Services are harder, a lot of the time. If you don't have your own photos, you can Google free photos and ensure that you have got the right to use them. Don't just go and take off Google, that's not allowed. Ones that are quite good are Pixabay or Unsplash, they are the two main ones that people use. You can also credit the photographer as well if you needed or wanted to do that.
How long should my blog be?
How long do you want to write it for? Personally, I would do a minimum of 300 words, optimum I'd say is about 500 and then 800 is a long blog. A blog can be however long you want it to be, but I would always mix up the length of blogs. You can have some short ones and some longer ones, depending on what you're style is. But make sure they are all different to keep your reader interested. Once you've written your blog, you know how to format it and you know what to put on there, you know what you’re writing about, you will get to the end and you should always be putting a call to action or if you like this blog, why don't you read this blog, so you're keeping them on your website. If it's something to do with one of your products, you could put a link at the bottom, as a banner or another graphic i.e. if you've enjoyed finding out about this product or service, here's what you do next. So you always giving them something or somewhere to go to next once they've read your blog. You need to put a call to action at the bottom.
Once I’ve posted my blog on my website, what do you do next?
A lot of people forget to do this crucial part, which is how to promote it, you have to promote your blog, don't just write it and run and hope that people will somehow find it. What you want to be doing is sharing it to your personal Facebook, as well as to all your social media platforms. So any social channels that you're using Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest is quite good as well and will help drive traffic as well. Share it to your stories as well let people know and talk about that.
So you've just done this blog post, you can also repurpose all those blog posts as well into quotes or graphics and put that on your social media. So again, once you've done it, and you've promoted it, don't just leave it. So keep coming back, do some graphics and keep going back to it. Keep that traffic getting to your website and get more people to read your blog.
I hope that has helped. If you do have any questions or anything you would like to know about blogging or you want someone to do your blog for you or anything like that, we do offer this service, and we would love to help you. So you can get in touch with us by sending us a private message or follow us on any of our social media channels. We would love to hear from you. So I will speak to you same time next week for another educational video.
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