Blogging Made Easy – Or How to Blog

I find that blogging is easiest if you have already planned ahead. As I promised in my last blog I’m offering tips on blogging. So the first thing I would tell you is to decide what you are going to write about and what audience you’re targeting. So, in other words who do you want to reach and what is your niche. Once you have determined what you want to blog about start doing keyword research in your niche and then create an editorial calendar for the next few months or even a year depending on your niche. Your editorial calendar can be generic or it can be very specific, or a combination. For instance, if you’re writing about your mountain climbing adventures, your calendar can simply have general topics around climbing interspersed with photos and stories around actual climbs. It’s always important to blog regularly even if you don’t have something exciting happening in your hobby, service or product business, so you’re going to want to include tips, anecdotes, commentary on other’s blogs and even guest posts.

Blogging Made Easy Tips

1. Choose a niche, what you want to write about, whether it’s to promote your business, share a hobby, teach about something or just a public diary of your activities. Take a look at other blogs in your niche and see what they’re writing about. It’s good to get inspiration and see how you can add your own spin and new ideas to the genre
2. Keyword research for SEO (search engine optimization) as well as to find out how others are searching for your niche. Here is an article from Yoast (my favorite SEO tool for WordPress) that can help you find keyword tools and direct your research.
3. Create an editorial calendar using the ideas you have for your blog. Your calendar can be as simple as a post type each week, for example 1) a tip 2) a story 3) answering a question and 4) announcement or news. Or you can divide the year up into 12 themes (this works well for selling products) New Years, Valentines’ Day, St. Patrick’s, April Fools, etc for the whole year and then within the theme write something each week following the post type. If you choose to use an editorial calendar to help you stay on top of your blog, always remember that you can deviate from the calendar when something important comes up that you want to talk about. Your calendar is a guide to help you focus.
4. Write in advance and schedule your posts in advance to help keep up. There is nothing more satisfying that having a posts created and scheduled a month or more ahead. Any one of them can be rescheduled if something comes up that you want to replace one of them. I find that when I have blogs in the bag, so to speak, I have time to find or think about new topics.
5. Keep looking for inspiration for your blog using current events, your own work, questions that have come up from your clients, and any new product/service or event/activity you’d like to introduce or announce. Reading a lot is also a good idea to find inspiration. Read online magazines in your niche as well as newspapers, and other blogs. Tip from Yoast: keep a list of ideas for new blog posts on your mobile phone. Inspiration comes when you least expect it.
6. Beautiful blogging takes writing skills and creativity, which is hard for some people, but it is most important that your content is original, readable and organized. My favorite SEO took also helps with readability. Ask me about the tool, it’s free and I only recommend it because it helps me.  Here are some tips for writing a beautiful blog:
   1. Plan ahead, think about your audience and what you want them to take away from your post. Remember you’re writing to share with others. Think about what they want to read.
   2. Write original content. You can be inspired by what you’ve read, distill others’ writing and interpret for yourself based on your experiences, but it must be your own writing. For instance, I am writing this for a couple of reasons, one is that many of my clients ask me why they should blog and I have been reading tips about how to blog to incorporate in my own blogs. By distilling the points they made with my experiences both on my own and other’s blogs I am able to compile this list of tips.
   3. Make sure that the content is readable. Keep your paragraphs short 7 or 8 sentences, use bulleted lists, such as what I am using, start each paragraph with the most important sentence and then support it with the rest of your paragraph.
   4. Optimize your blog for search engines, again, Yoast comes in handy for that. It’s tool will tell you what you need to do to help you with SEO. I will be optimizing this post when I’m done writing it.
   5. Interact with your commenters, it takes a while for people to start commenting on your blogs, but keep at it, they will come as long as you are using your keywords an optimizing. Additionally share your blog posts on social media. I have found that more people comment on my posts on social media than on the blog itself, but the blog is bringing people to my site and that is good.
7. Finally, pick a frequency and stick to it. II recommend once a week to my clients, I blog every Monday. Pick a day and stick to it. If once a week seems daunting and you want to start out blogging once a month, make sure you post once a month, preferably on the same day, but I am going to suggest that you try and build up to once a week. The recommended length for a good blog is 300 words, which isn’t really all that much, but you can get away with a single sentence and a video or an introduction and then an infographic as long as you’re giving your readers what they are looking for you’re fine.

Blogging doesn’t have to be a hardship and if you follow the steps above you should be able to create an awesome blog to promote your business, discuss your hobby, teach your skill or whatever you want to share with the world. If you want to blog but you don’t feel you have the skills or the time, Copper Moon Media has superb content writers who will edit your content, or ghost write content for your blog (or website content for that matter). Contact us today to help. We do what we do, so you have time to excel at what you do.