Today, I will give a few tips how to write a good (and effective) blog.
Obviously, your approach will depend upon what you want your blog to accomplish for you.
You might be writing a blog to...
- Collect Your Thoughts: You might want to keep an ongoing journal of your thoughts.
- Practice Writing: You might want some practice writing where you have a "safe" editor. (You! Will YOU reject your own work?)
- Demonstrate Your Work: Blogs are a great way to demonstrate some of your experience.
- Maybe you are trying to show that you know how to write.
- Perhaps, you're trying to show that you can do something consistently.
- You might be trying to summarize your experiences, and blogs could be a way to document some of those.
- Build a Following: A marketer can always be looking for new people, or a marketer can find ways to keep the people once they find him or her. A blog that's entertaining, educational, or otherwise valuable can lead to people wanting to follow what you're doing. Often, this make it easier to sell to people in this group.
- Develop an Information Source: Slowly, you can build a bank of information related to your topic. Once you have enough information, people might find you and consider your website to be an information source. Once this happens, traffic will visit your site often, and you will receive a lot of natural backlinks to your site.
- Create an SEO Tool: Blogs can be used as an offsite SEO tool to create backlinks to your website.
Tips for Writing Blogs
Use Internal Backlinks: You can use links to (a) your home page, (b) different pages of your website, or (c) different blog posts (each have their own website name URL).
Use Relevant Anchor Text: Anchor text is the phrase you see that you can click to go to another link. (Example: Welcome Page, where you only see "Welcome Page," even though clicking on it takes you to another link.) Using anchor text is a good idea for several reasons, but the biggest one is that it reinforces the keywords that you want to associate with the "linked" page. This shows search engines that your backlink is relevant for the anchor text words.
Use HTML Tags: Use Title Tags on links. Use Alt Tags on Images. Use header tags on your posts, especially H1 and H2 tags, possibly H3 tags, also. Of course, use your keyword phrases within each of these tags.
Use Keyword Phrases: Besides HTML tags, use your keyword phrases throughout your blog post: Title, 1st sentence of your post (if possible), label/category/keyword, HTML tags, and anchor text. Make sure that your keyword usage is natural, though.
Make It Readable: If your visitors don't want to read what you write, then you'll lose a lot of return visitors. Write short paragraphs. Use bold, italics, and header tags to make it easier to break down the material. Keep your blog posts from being too long. (I'm guilty of this one!) If your blog post is long, break it into two (2) or three (3) posts.
Update It Regularly: Keep your content fresh. If your material is interesting or helpful and constantly changes, people will WANT to return to your site. They are also more likely to recommend it.
Let People Know Your RSS Link: First, know what your RSS link to your blog site. Once you know it, give it to people: in an e-mail, in person, or just make it easy to find on your website. Make it easy for them to post it on their site (so that they can broadcast updates from your site on their site). Essentially, you're making it easier for other people to advertise you without you having to pay for it.
Writing blog posts does not have to be hard. In fact, don't worry if you're not doing EVERYTHING that I'm suggesting here. If you do even a few of these things, your blog will be better than many others on the web, and you'll look better for it.
Just keep writing and thinking of new ideas to share.
No comments:
Post a Comment