Deciding to start a blog is a huge step toward establishing yourself as an industry expert and strengthening your digital footprint. Whether you’re a new blogger or an experienced one, creating a successful blog can open the doors to make money blogging and build a robust online presence.
Today, having a blog is a necessity for any business or personal brand looking to thrive online. Every new blog post contributes to your authority, builds trust, and helps you get more leads and sales. Plus, with the right blog content and SEO tactics, you can even earn through avenues like Google AdSense.
A decade ago, society was in the early stages of adopting the smartphone. The Internet had been steadily gaining traction but was still a relatively fresh concept. The unique situation meant that business owners still had access to an abundance of offline growth opportunities.
But today, the narrative has significantly shifted. In the absence of a well-optimized, robust online presence, businesses risk missing out on potential sales, customer relationships, and opportunities to establish trust and authority in their industry. This is where having a well-designed blog, perhaps using a WordPress theme and a reliable blog hosting provider, becomes crucial.
Strategically incorporating a blog into your website is a potent way to meet these objectives. Presenting well-researched, valuable, and credible information in a blog helps to position your business as a top player within your industry. Plus, quality blog posts play a pivotal role in building trust with your customers and guiding them along their journey.
Thousands of business owners wonder how to create a blog, but don’t know where to start. Today you’ll learn everything you need to know to create your own blog and start posting so you can grow your business.
SEO Benefits of Blogging: Building Trust with Search Engines
Trust-building goes beyond just your customers. Consistently publishing insightful content helps establish rapport with your customers and builds your reputation on search engines like Google.
High trust ratings increase the likelihood of your website appearing at the top spot in Google’s search rankings. This is part of why you want a content strategy full of engaging blog post ideas. Sticking to a content strategy allows you to publish high-quality blog posts every time.
In a world where smartphones serve as our go-to problem solvers, consumers often turn to Google with questions or search queries related to their problems. An informative, SEO-optimized blog significantly enhances the chances of your website appearing with the solution your customer is looking for.
So how do you strengthen SEO in your blog or on your web pages?
There are many tools available to help you do so, but ClearBrand’s favorite is SurferSEO. Designed to enhance content and page rankings, Surfer provides AI-assisted recommendations to help you optimize your content and copy for specific keywords.
The application’s built-in content editor makes it incredibly user-friendly, and it’s capable of writing new content from scratch or importing published content from a URL. By the way, they’re not paying us to say all of this great stuff – we just like them that much.
But it’s not just about keywords. Surfer also assists with site structure and organization to make sure your posts include strategic backlinks in the right places. The tool provides an invaluable competitive edge by offering average and top scores for similar content written by your competitors.
Selecting Your Blogging Platform: Two Recommendations
Begin by checking whether your current website platform supports a blog feature. This straightforward approach is the most convenient way to start. The next stage involves researching your target audience’s interests and questions.
Using tools like UberSuggest or even a simple Google search can be beneficial in gaining these insights. You can use this knowledge to focus on crafting detailed, helpful articles that resonate deeply with your audience.
If your website platform doesn’t offer blogging features, two notable alternatives are worth considering. The first is Squarespace, an intuitive platform known for its aesthetically pleasing templates and user-friendly blogging interface. However, it falls short when it comes to effective copywriting support.
The second recommendation is a product the team at ClearBrand has created: the pre-built website template. Designed with a dual focus on aesthetics and sales effectiveness, this website template is optimized for clear, persuasive communication.
5 Steps To Publishing Your First Blog Post
Whether you post on SquareSpace or a self-hosted WordPress blog, your success largely depends on your ability to create engaging, relevant content. Coming up with blog post topics and titles that will attract and retain readers is a crucial part of this process. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you develop a solid content strategy:
Step 1: Perform Keyword Research
Your blog topics should be influenced by what your potential readers are searching for. Using tools like SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner, you can discover the most popular and relevant keywords in your industry or niche. This will help you understand what your audience is interested in and create blog content that answers their queries. With a list of keywords in hand, you’re one step closer to publishing your first blog post – and ready for step 2.
Step 2: Leverage Google Snippets
Google’s featured snippets are a great resource for finding commonly asked questions related to your keywords and blog niche. These are the questions and answers that appear at the top of Google’s search results. By addressing these questions in your blog online, you can increase the chances of your blog pages being found and read.
Start by running a simple Google search for one of the keywords you intend to write about. Then locate the snippets, generally visible towards the top of the search page, just under the “sponsored” section.
Click a snippet to expand the answer, and continue opening more snippets to load more questions.
These questions contain the ideas you’ll use to generate a list of potential titles for your blog posts.
Step 3: Generate a List of Titles
Based on your keyword research and the popular questions you’ve discovered, generate a list of potential blog titles by examining the main ideas contained in each question.
These should be enticing. Each blog post title should contain at least one main keyword you identified during step 1. Ideally, they should also tie into your blog theme.
Remember, your title is the first thing a potential reader sees, so make it count! Use the questions in the snippets for each keyword to brainstorm additional questions you can answer in your posts. And don’t be afraid to look at other blogs from your competition to find out what they’re doing too. Just remember to keep your own titles and posts as relevant to your primary keywords as possible.
Step 4: Outline Each Post
Take the questions you came up with during step 3, and use them to begin outlining your posts for each researched keyword. You’ll follow these outlines as you’re writing blog posts.
You can use them as the subheadings of your posts to guide your writing process. This step helps you create comprehensive content that fully answers your readers’ queries and positions you as an authority on the subject.
It also provides the opportunity to expand your outline and address new questions that arise as you write.
Step 5: Get To Writing and Schedule Your Posts
Now that you have your blogs outlined, it’s time to start writing. Craft your posts in a way that’s informative, engaging, and valuable to your readers.
Write multiple drafts and play with the locations of different sections to make sure the post has a clean, logical flow that’s easy for readers to follow.
This is where tools like Surfer are insanely helpful. Using Surfer, you can see real-time changes to your search engine optimization score as you make edits to your posts. You’ll find that the structure of your page, number of paragraphs, and included headings all heavily influence your search ranking.
Once you’ve written your posts and optimized them for the keywords you wish to target, you can schedule them to be published at regular intervals. Regularly updating your blog with new content is a great way to retain your readers and attract new ones.
The Story-Driven Website: Selling Through Clear Communication
Starting a blog is no easy feat, but when done well, the payoff is outstanding. Our pre-built website template equips you with all the necessary sections for selling your services online, including a ready-to-use blog page.
It’s an ideal solution if you’re planning to build your website and blog independently, and comes with a perfect blend of appealing design and sales effectiveness.
Both Squarespace and the pre-built website template offer viable options for launching a blog and creating a new website. Squarespace impresses with its visually appealing templates, while the website template stands out for a combination of design and sales functionalities.
Choosing the right platform will depend on your specific needs, but either way, you’ll be taking a significant step toward establishing your online authority through blog posts. Want us to build your website for you? Contact us today to speak to a marketing specialist about how we can help you create a website your audience loves.
