When new businesses get a new website a lot of times they want a blog page. When clients come to us and they want a blog on their new website, deep down in side I want to say “Are you going to really blog? Do you understand the commitment? Do you even know why you want a blog? And as much as you want to believe they will, no one will come to your blog at first? And are you ok with that. If not I can give you another really cool page” Lol… I want you all to know that a blog is really important and every business needs one but if you are not going to commit or have someone in your business designated to commit, then I don’t want you to do it, because no blog is better than a poorly managed blog, but a well-managed blog is the best of the best! And I’m going to give you the ins and outs of a well managed blog.
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Blog vs blog post
Blog – Entire web log
Blog Post – One entry in a web log
How a blog will help your biz
Inside of 9 months
A blog will help close you sales a little faster for large ticket items or services.
Your sales funnel may go like this. The prospect learns about your business through a friend or you and then they go to your site to check out how real you are. Having a well maintenance blog will definitely help to solidify your authenticity once people do come to your website.
For smaller priced items, customers may be actually finding you online through social media or email marketing and people most likely will pull the trigger right then and there, but the presence of a well maintenance blog does establish trust. People will feel more comfortable pulling the trigger if they know someone is taking the site seriously.
Outside of 9 months
I mentioned that your blog isn’t going to help you get search engine traffic for a while but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t start. 9 months to a year seems like a long time to get organic traffic but its not. You have to start somewhere.
The relationship of Google, SEO and your blog
For those of you who don’t know, SEO is search engine optimization, the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
A long time ago in ancient SEO times way back in the late 90s-the mid to late 2000s people used to do all sorts of witch craft to get their websites ranked in search engines…we called this black hat tricks. An example would be if you sold red socks on your site and you wanted to rank for that then you would make text the same color as your background and write red sock all over the back of your site so no one could see it but when Google crawled the site it would read it and know that you are serious about the red socks business.
The tricks got a lot more sophisticated but Google has always gotten hip to people’s tricks and dinged or penalized people or took them out the search engine all together. It’s hard to get back in Google’s good graces. So Google’s whole existence has been to put in place algorithms such as “Panda” to hurt people who have crappy sites that don’t provide real content and rely on Black Hat tricks.
So how can we now manipulate the search engines?
All of Google’s algorithm changes, information releases, and penalizing have all lead to one conclusion: they have been telling the world what they want from you in exchange for ranking you in their search engine…good quality long content and other reputable people linking to your good quality content. That’s all they want. And trust me, I know you work hard, you are smart, you got some good quality content up there in your dome.
Rules run your blog so that you get traffic from it 9 months to a year from now
- Blog Regularly
- Promote Your posts
- Link to other reputable sites
How to choose a blog post topics
- Keep a space in your phone or your computer that you make notes about what blog post topics you want to explore, as the ideas come to you. Use client interactions, customer conversations, the news, or even arguments that you have with your significant other as inspiration.
- Restrict yourself to writing about aspects of the business that you actually love. This will help you write faster and create unique content. It will allow you to develop your tone of voice for the blog and this way you will be providing the world with unique valuable content (what Google loves).
- See what’s in the news about your industry, write a commentary piece or a news recap.
- Write about what’s going on in your business
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How to Write a Blog Post
- Choose a good title
- Use Header Tags
- Name your picture on your hard drive before you upload
- Fill in the “Alt Title”
- Write at least 300-2,000 words –
- According to Neil Patel at quicksprout.com “The average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words. The higher up you go on the search listings page, the more content each web page has.” I suggest that you write a variety ranging from 300 words to 2000 words.
- Be clear and concise
- Fact Check
- Have an Intro, Body, & Outro
- Write conversationally
