Thinking about blogging for your small business?
There’s never been a better time to get started than right now in 2021.
The potential for bringing customers to your business through Google is almost limitless.
Writing blog posts that answer people’s questions and help them, is an incredible way to bring new customers in via your website, as well as helping your existing ones.
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Do Blogs Help Small Businesses?
Short answer – Yes! Blogs can massively help small businesses.
When you create amazing posts that give value to the reader and are optimized for Google, your business is going to appear on the results page when people search for a specific term on Google…
Blogging can bring in thousands of new website visitors which can then become customers. This is one of the biggest benefits of blogging for business.
While you may attract customers to your existing products/services your blog can also provide you with online income streams (such as affiliates or digital products).
In this post, we are going to go through exactly, step by step, how you can start blogging for your small business…
How Do I Write a Small Business Blog? | Step By Step
Getting Started - Your Blogging Action Plan
As a small business, the most important thing to remember is that you’re aiming to help your readers.
Before starting, you need to create a plan to get some ideas together for what to blog about.
1. Ask yourself - What would your customers like to know?
The first thing you need to establish is how you’re actually going to help your customers.
You can start by asking yourself:
- What do you know that your customers don’t?
- What would your customers like to know more about?
- What do you get asked about the most by customers, friends, or colleagues?
These questions are going to help you understand what you know about that most people don’t.
This should kickstart some ideas as to what you should be blogging about.
2. Create a blogging mind-map (with keyword research)
Next, it’s time to do some keyword research.
You may have heard this term before and it is one of the most crucial elements that go into running a successful blog for your small business.
By using a keyword tool (such as Keywords Everywhere) you can gain super valuable insights into data for any keyword term.
For example, if your search:
‘How to start a business’ In Google, Keywords Everywhere would give you the following data:
Volume – 1000 PM
CPC $1.80
Comp 0.66
- Volume (how many people search for this term per month)
- CPC (cost per click – how much Google thinks this keyword is worth)
- COMP (this is your competition, out of 100, on how hard it is to rank for the term)
Using this data, you will be able to see what’s worth blogging about and what isn’t.
By looking at volume, you will be able to see how many searches a term gets, which will help you decide if it’s worth trying to rank for (if you’re new to blogging it is worth going after keywords with lower search volume and lower competition).
From looking at this keyword data for multiple different search terms from within your niche, data, you will be able to start creating a mind map of potential blogging ideas. Whenever you search for a term using Keywords Everywhere, it will give you suggestions of related keywords and phrases.
To create your mind map, start by recording the largest volume/most competitive keywords first, then record the smaller volumed keywords.
I always record this in the form of a min map, and afterward, it looks like a huge spider’s web of keyword ideas.
Tip – Keywords that are longer, as in their phrases rather than single words, are known as long-tail keywords. These are the types of keywords you ideally want to be starting with when you’re new.
The idea of this is to give yourself a huge, interlinking web of blogging ideas, that has your whole niche covered…
For Each Individual Blog Post
Once you have created your mindmap. It’s now time to start creating your first-ever blog post!
To do so, follow the steps below…
1. Do Keyword Research
You already have a few ideas of what you want to blog about, so you should start with low competition, long-tail keywords.
But before you jump right in, you need to do some extra keyword research beforehand.
Type your keyword into Google and take a look at the Keywords Everywhere suggestions, as well as Google’s, “also searched for” and the “people also ask” sections.
These areas are going to help you massively when structuring your posts. You only ever want to be creating content that helps people and is optimized for Google. Creating your content in this way is going to lead to success for your blog.
2. Outline Your Post Purpose/Objective
After doing your keyword research, decide what the main objective of your post is!
This is super important and is going to help you stay on track when you begin writing.
What do you want your readers to learn from the post? Write down exactly what you want a reader to achieve, this can be one single objective or a few different ones.
For example, if you decided to write a blog post on ‘how to make start a business’
You want your objective to be a ‘reader will learn how to start their own business
Everything you then create within your post needs to help the reader learn how to do this, in the clearest most engaging way possible.
3. Beat the competition
The next thing you need to do is make sure your post has gone above and beyond your competitors’ content.
Before writing any post, consider – how can I create better content than all the other websites that are ranking on the first page of google? (For the keyword I want to go after)
Simply make a note of what they have included (especially the top 3 results) and create content that is better and more in-depth!
What can you add to your post that your competitors don’t have?
4. Start By Outlining Your Post and Use Headings
Now you need to create your headings! So it’s time to open up a Google Docs Page and start putting your first words down…
Before doing any actual writing though it is important to outline the structure of your post by using subheadings.
Your main title should have an H1 tag, then any subheadings below should be H2’s.
Do this by trying to help the reader as much as possible while at the same time using Google’s ‘People Also Asked’ section and the Keywords Everywhere suggestions.
Make sure to incorporate your keyword into your main title and once or twice into your subheadings if possible. This is a really important SEO ranking factor!
If we go back to our ‘how to start a business’ example, you might structure a blog post like this;
5. Writing your post
Now comes the time to actually start writing your post.
If you’re writing a blog post for the first time, chances are you might not be the world’s best writer, but it doesn’t matter.
Just use your subheads as the guiding light as you write.
Simply answer the subheadings you have written as best as you can and try not to go off track from answering each subhead.
Writing in this way is going to help you produce clear and easy-to-read content that actually helps your readers!
6. Edit
Once you have written your post, you definitely don’t want to post it straight away and simply forget about it!
Now you need to go back through it and make it amazing.
Think of your first draft as the rough outline of your sculpture, that now needs to be chipped away at and sanded down to make it beautiful.
Be strict with your editing and drop anything that doesn’t contribute to your subheadings and overall post objective.
7. Add Images, Video, Internal & External Links
After editing your post, it’s time to start really optimizing it for SEO. There are a number of factors that improve your on-page SEO and doing the following is going to massively help you!
Go back through your post and add;
- Table of contents
- Images at regular intervals
- Embed a relevant video
- Add links to other pages/posts on your site
- Add external links to authoritative domains
- Space out your content so it is as clear and easy to read as possible
So, Should I Start a Blog for My Business?
By following all these steps in this article, you’ll be well on your way to having a blog for your small business.
However, it’s important to remember that blogging successfully takes time, especially when you’re new to it.
Blogging can be such a lucrative side to your business when you become good at it or you’re hiring professional help.
Due to the massive potential to reach such a large audience through the web, you almost can’t afford to not have a business blog in 2021…
If you need any help creating a blog for your small business, I can help by providing you with a FREE blogging mind map to get you started.
