Brisbane Copywriter Shares Their Blogging Secrets
A quarter of Australian business owners already work 7 days per week and 34% of them continue working through their summer holiday without taking a break. Given these statistics, it’s totally understandable why so many local and small businesses have never bothered with managing their own copywriting or blog. The problem however, is that blogging and blog content creation is one of the most powerful search engine ranking and customer conversion strategies a business can invest in.
In this Blog
Before we go any further, this blog article is for both:
1. DIY-Bloggers
We’re talking those looking to self-manage their own blog and are interested in streamlining the process. When faced with the prospect of DIY blogging, with the aim of trying to leverage quality website content for search engine ranking… too many business owners assume grossly underestimate what’s involved in running a Blog.
2. Professional Copywriter Hirers
This includes local business owners wishing to learn more about what’s involved when hiring a copywriter, so they know they are making the most informed decision possible. Without a copywriter many business owners would never have a blog, let alone one that worked to promote their business. For some, trying to run a blog themselves is not a viable or logical approach, and it may be best to hire a professional.
Chances are you fit into one of these two categories or are a blend of the two, depending where you are in your business.
In this blog, we’ll share our 5 Secrets to Planning and Running a Blog
- Map out your content calendar
- Organise blog themes
- Writing quality blog content
- Use SEO strategies
- Publish and design your blog
Planning and publishing blog posts is an essential part of getting your website content together. If you think you can run a blog just because you know a lot about your industry, it’s time to think again.
You’ll also see how a professional blog copywriter can save you time by taking on these tasks and completing them to an exceptional standard, every time.
5 Blogging Secrets from a
Brisbane Copywriter
1 | Create a Content Calendar
Behind the blogs of 77% of businesses lies a content marketing strategy. This valuable information becomes the blueprint of your business’s success with its blog copywriting efforts.
Rather than scrambling to think of a topic every week or month (then missing the deadline and looking inconsistent); a content plan, and schedule, allows you to brainstorm and schedule content ahead of time. It also allows you to pre-empt seasonal influences and special holidays (e.g. Valentine’s Day, Christmas) and what you could be writing about to match your audience.
Plan Your Blog Content Calendar
Building a content plan in a calendar format allows you to plan themed content well in advance. The content plan should map out the year clearly so you can visualise when blog content is going out, and how it aligns with your business calendar.
For example, imagine you own a plumbing business in Brisbane and you experience an influx of blocked drain jobs in winter. If you have a savvy copywriter onside, they’ll plan for blog topics about blocked drain advice to be published just before, or during the winter months.
2 | Organise Blog Content into Themes
Whether you are going for the DIY approach, or the hire a professional copywriter route, planning your blogs themes each week or month will make the process much easier. Once this is done, either you or your blog copywriter will organise then hone each blog and it’s topic to match your ideal target audience / customer persona.
DIY Copywriting: We highly recommend doing your own target audience / customer persona analysis before planning out what you’re going to write. Our target audience / customer persona blog offers a downloadable worksheet that will run you through this process.
A Brisbane Copywriter’s Approach: we talk with you about your services and your audience to carry out this analysis for you. We then theme your blog content to align with your different products/services with the aim to strengthen your search engine ranking. Because articles are strategically focused on a certain target audience, their pain points, and the questions they ask, your blogs are more likely to not only rank in searches, but also appeal to those you want to do business with.
Let’s continue with the plumbing example, If your plumbing business covers residential, commercial, and government buildings – you can’t target all those customers at once. An experienced copywriter would separate each customer persona as a theme, then create blog topics that target each one effectively.
Click here for more information about what Web-Sta offers as part of their blogging service
3 | Writing Quality Blog Content
Blog writing takes more than just correct grammar and interesting topics, it also involves writing with an awareness of what your target audience is looking for. This is often what sets a DIY bloggers and professional copywriters apart.
What do good copywriters aim for?
- The ideal length for blogs is 1500-2100 words
- Matching a highly searched key word/search phrase with a blog theme / topic that’s most likely going to appeal to your audience
- Opportunities to link to relevant external websites to verify statistics and claims
- A good mix of wording and images
- A flow that’s easy to follow
- Headings that are compelling, yet also incorporate elements of the search identified for that blog
- Opportunity to highlight examples or case studies to support any article claims
Once you have your blog/s written, getting it proof read is highly valuable to pick up any grammatical and spelling errors.
In our plumbing example, the approach here could include adding in before and after photos of plumbing repairs, as well as include headings that cover Frequently Asked Questions. It could also be matched based on the time of year.
4 | Use SEO Strategies
You might have heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). If you want your business’s blog to attract new prospective customers, then copywriting for SEO becomes part of the process.
Implementing a solid SEO strategy requires research and planning, as well as skilful blog copywriting to seamlessly weave keywords into engaging sentences (without sounding like a robot).
The following tasks are essential for SEO-focused copywriting:
- Use a free or paid keyword research tool (then learn how to use it)
- Conduct thorough research into the keywords and search queries that you might like to focus on
- Choose relevant and appropriate keywords for each blog theme that you’ve already mapped out
- Include images that are optimised with keyword-rich Alt tags
- Include links to other reputable sources to back-up your information (as we have above)
- Prepare social media snippets to share your blog across your social channels
5 | Design & Publish
It’s one thing to write the text for a blog post, but blog copywriting also involves design and publishing skills. This ensures that your blog has an attractive layout that fits within your brand guidelines, and looks engaging enough for people to spend time reading it!
If you don’t have access to edit your own website, reach out to your website designer to take care of the uploading of your blog articles, and their associated images, on your behalf. They’ll be able to take care of all of the layout and mobile responsive requirements, as well as take care of the background coding (metadata) that will really take your blog to the next level.
Ideally, your headings and blog flow lends itself well to an easy to read and engaging experience for your audience.
Let’s Recap
The 5 main areas required to plan and manage a blog includes the following:
- Map out your content calendar
- Organise blog themes
- Writing quality blog content
- Use SEO strategies
- Publish and design your blog
If you’re prepared to learn the tricks, then fantastic. Remember to blog at least monthly; or better still, weekly to build momentum fast.
For more information about our valuable blogging services, talk to Web-Sta today, and we wish you all the best on your blogging journey.
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