Many entrepreneurs I meet through my consulting work feel the pressure of what I call “the blogging burden.” They know that blogging would help increase their visibility, showcase their expertise, and cultivate relationships with their target audience. But committing to regularly publishing content just seems so arduous. Where do you find good ideas? How do you craft content that will resonate with your audience? And, of course, where on earth do you find the writing time?
In this chapter, we’ll knock down some common barriers that prevent entrepreneurs from establishing a strong online platform for their business. You’ll learn how to define your blog and your blog voice, how to generate topics, and how to create a strategic blogging calendar. You’ll soon discover that blogging offers you one of the most flexible and fun ways to connect with your audience, and working blog-writing into your weekly schedule is easier than you might think.
Your Blog, Your Way
The word “blog” is a rather shapeless word that makes me think of “blob.” I know it’s short for “web log,” but what the heck is that? Unlike more established kinds of writing, such as reports or proposals, the blog lacks any kind of standard definition. There are no hard-edged requirements to guide you as you generate posts and weave them into a cohesive online publication.
That lack of established guidance can create a sense of overwhelm—unless you look at its flip side. Because there’s no Worldwide Blogging Authority to tell you what your blog could or should look like, you’re free to give it the form that best suits you and your audience. Once you define what blogging means for you, you’re able to give yourself your own guidelines, and that structure simplifies the process of choosing topics, generating ideas, and producing content.
To define blogging your way, use the PAVE method. Spend some time exploring these four questions:
•What is your PURPOSE for the blog? What do you want your blog to achieve? Frame your answer as specific outcome statements that begin with verbs.
•Who is your ideal AUDIENCE? If you’ve created avatars for your website, then you may able to use them to define your blog audience. (If you haven’t yet created your avatars, check out Chapter 4.) Or you may want your blog to target an audience that’s narrower than your website audience.
•What VALUE do you want to offer? Your blog provides a great way for you to demonstrate your expertise, but your audience will take the time to read it only if it delivers immediate value. Immediate value means information and insights they can apply right away, without buying your product or service.
•How do you want to ENGAGE with your audience? Your blog could offer superbly helpful content tailored to the precise needs and interests of your audience, but if it doesn’t foster direct engagement, then it won’t repay your effort. Consider the different ways you could integrate calls to action into your blog posts. For example, you could invite your audience to:
○Connect with you via social media
○Download a web giveaway on a related topic
○Book a free consult
○Respond to a poll
○Share a comment
○Submit a question to be addressed in another post
Once you’ve answered the four PAVE questions, you should be able to draft a brief mission statement for your blog.
The PURPOSE of my blog is to build an online community of people committed to replacing physical gifts with gift-experiences. My AUDIENCE comprises people of various age groups (primarily 20- and 30-somethings) who are committed to a zero-waste lifestyle, earn more than $60,000 a year, and live in urban centers across the United States. I offer the VALUE of practical ways to rethink the various ways we celebrate special occasions. I plan to ENGAGE with my audience by inviting them to download free resources, share Instagram posts of creative gift-experiences they have given or received, and participate in polls.
Such a statement provides the structure and writing guidelines to “pave” the way for you to generate on-brand, on-target posts that will wow your audience and woo them to you.
Defining Your Blog Voice
When we think about “brand identity,” our mind tends to go straight to graphic design. But writing style also plays an important role in shaping the impression people form of your organization. Defining the kind of blog you’ll create gives you a great opportunity to dive into the design of your brand voice, your company’s writing personality.
Your brand voice comes across through the many different style choices you make as you produce written content. If you’ve read the chapter on website giveaways (Chapter 5), then you’ve already started to contemplate some of those choices. You’ve thought about the kind of “helper profile” you’d like to create when you’re offering free advice and about the particular communication style such a helper should use. Now it’s time to take that thinking deeper by designing the voice for your overall brand.
We’ll borrow a technique from graphic designers, the brand board. When graphic designers construct a brand identity, they collect various visual elements that resonate with the brand owner and assemble them on a digital or paper board. That way, the brand owner can see at a glance the key elements that define their organization visually such as the logo, primary and secondary fonts, primary and secondary color palettes, icons, and so on.
You can take a similar approach to describing your brand’s voice identity. Follow these steps to create a writing brand board:
1.Identify three to five key words that describe the personality of your company. Write those in the center of your page or screen and circle each word.
2.Brainstorm words that you associate with the way a person with that personality speaks. Cluster these voice descriptors around your five key words.
3.Add images of people who speak and/or write in a way that embodies your voice descriptors. You can draw the images or use photos. Your images can be real people, dead or alive, or fictional characters. If your imagination leads you to celebrities, talking animals, or a 15th-century inventor, then by all means include them.
4.Include voice clips of brands you admire. Add sentences or short paragraphs from websites and blogs you admire because their writing personality aligns with the voice you’d like to create.
Once you’ve created your writing brand board, take some time to reflect on it. If you’re a solopreneur, you may want to journal about the experience of creating the board, your interpretation of the final product, and the practical guidelines it provides. If your team has helped create the brand board, be sure to debrief on the insights it has delivered and to capture those learnings as best practices for anyone blogging or producing writing on behalf of the company.
Now that you’ve defined your brand, it will take practice to implement it consistently. One of the best ways to develop your writing style is to emulate the style of others. For centuries, this was the way most educators taught writing, and even today creative writing instructors often use this approach. For instance, budding novelists might be asked to write a passage as if they were Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison. You can apply this tried-and-true learning method by using your voice clips, or other samples from the brands they represent, as models as you craft blog posts.
How to Generate Hot Blog Topics
When I meet someone who’s experiencing “blogging burden,” they’re often worried about delivering regular content to their audience because they can’t imagine coming up with fresh, valuable content at least once a week. Two fintech entrepreneurs from Halifax, Canada, have found a way to overcome that hurdle, using a data-driven approach. Their key advice: “It’s all about the process.”
Karen Lightstone and Laurie Sinclair are two long-time friends with a shared passion for helping entrepreneurs make their businesses more profitable. Karen teaches accounting in the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University. Laurie has a consulting background and now works for a not-for-profit organization that empowers women entrepreneurs. Together, Karen and Laurie created Finazz (www.finazz.com), a cloud-based application that makes it easy for entrepreneurs to view and interpret their financial data.
The Finazz founders approach blogging with a systematic approach you’d expect from an accountant and a consultant. Rather than leaving it up to the blogging muse to inspire their posts, they collect and analyze market data to guide their planning.
Working with a digital marketing strategist, Laurie and Karen have researched key words a customer might use when looking for solutions to some of the problems Finazz addresses, such as not understanding why take-home income is low even when sales are up. These key words serve as launching points for brainstorming specific blog posts. For instance, because so many entrepreneurs have trouble understanding “revenue” and “profits,” an upcoming post will bear the headline “Revenue is for vanity; profit is for sanity.”
Karen and Laurie also use conversations with entrepreneurs in their community as input. For instance, Karen experienced an aha moment when a business owner proudly showed her a new revenue-tracking app, which he believed gave him all the financial information he needed to know, although it gave him insight only into how much money he was taking in, not how much he was spending. Through her work with women entrepreneurs, Laurie also gets daily insight into both the pain points business owners experience related to financial data and the hidden issues they’re unaware of.
As Finazz posts blog articles, Karen and Laurie use web analytics tools to track the audience’s response, and then they use that data to develop future posts. Focusing on what the data tells them about their readers enables them to view their blog content from the customer vantage point, something that’s tough to do. Laurie explains: “When you are innovative and create something, it takes a long time, and you’re so in it that things are so very obvious to you. It’s very hard to change your thinking to understand how someone else is viewing it.”
Planning Your Blogging Time
Halfway through my interview with Finazz, as the cofounders recall stories about entrepreneurs who are out of touch with their “numbers,” Karen grabs a notepad and starts recording new ideas for blog themes and headlines. Later, working with their digital marketing strategist, Laurie and she will add those ideas to their calendar of upcoming blog posts, which forms part of their overall social media plan.
The Finazz blogging calendar gives Karen and Laurie a strategic tool to guide their content development. Because it’s based on audience data, it provides ready-made topics business owners should find pertinent and engaging. Rather than waiting for creative inspiration to strike, Karen and Laurie simply look to the calendar for direction.
This strategic, market-centered approach not only helps prevent writer’s block. It also overcomes one of the most common mistakes Laurie sees entrepreneurs commit, thinking that “they are the driver of their business.” But, says Laurie, “It’s not about you.” Customers drive your revenue, so smart business owners look to them to drive all other aspects of the business too. Creating a data-driven blogging calendar ensures that your customers, not your personal whims, are driving your blog.
To set up your own calendar, you may want to configure an Excel spreadsheet like the example on the next page. If you prefer to work by hand, you can also use a paper calendar or even a piece of loose-leaf. Or you might want to check out some of the free templates offered by social media consultants and providers of social media tools. (Hubspot offers a particularly rich resource library.)
Start by producing a list of key words and phrases related to problems your customers recognize and want to solve. Use these to generate a list of monthly themes for the next two to three months. Organizing a month’s worth of content around a set theme helps create continuity and cohesiveness so that your blog functions as a unified online publication, not just a collection of random articles. Monthly themes also make it easy for you to link blog posts to sales events, such as product launches and seasonal promotions.
With your monthly themes in place, you can then generate post topics and, if you’re really on a roll, some of your headlines. If you’re integrating your blogging calendar with a comprehensive social media plan, then look for opportunities to align blog content with other social media postings.
Figure 6.1 shows part of a strategic blogging calendar developed in an Excel spreadsheet.
Figure 6.1 Strategic blogging calendar
Once you start using your calendar to generate full blog posts, scheduling your writing sessions becomes automatic. Your customers drive your content, and your pre-booked content drives your regular writing sessions. With a system in place, you no longer have to rely on random bursts of the creative impulse to produce high-quality posts.
Your calendar also functions as a tracking tool. Use it to record your final headlines and document the audience response. The more closely you keep your eye on how your audience interacts with your blog, the easier you’ll find it to produce engaging content on a regular schedule. No need to worry about running out of ideas. Just keep tuning into your customers’ problems and paying attention to the language they use to talk about them, and you’ll never lack for engaging blog content.
Seven Key Practices for Creating Compelling Posts
So far, you’ve defined the kind of blog you’re producing, described your brand voice, and established a system for generating two to three months’ worth of topics at time. Now, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of crafting blog posts. Here are seven key practices that will help you turn a topic for a post into a fully developed article that grabs your audience’s attention and encourages them to engage with you beyond the blog.
1.Obsess over your headline. As you’ll recall from Chapter 3, most effective headlines actually follow a proven formula, so take time to study the formulas and learn how to apply them to your situation. Also think about how your headline can evoke a specific emotion. Curiosity, fear, surprise, and desire prove particularly powerful levers to pull.
2.Create visual appeal. An arresting visual creates an emotional “hook” to lure your reader into the body of your post. A relevant, emotionally resonant visual can also suggest metaphors or concepts to explore in your post. No budget for images? Check out Pixabay and Unsplash, two of my favorite online sources of free high-resolution photos.
3.Show proof of value up front. Blog writing is the art of continual seduction. First, you lure your audience with a strong headline. Then you intrigue them with an appealing image. Next, in your first paragraph, you show them the value the post as a whole will deliver.
Some bloggers fall into the trap of thinking that holding their main idea back for the end of a post will build suspense and keep the audience’s attention. But a blog post is not a detective novel. Remember the impatient insect brain of our typical web user? “Sticky” blog posts state the main idea up front to convince users that the rest of the post merits their sustained attention.
4.Vary the format of your posts. Keep that buzzing insect brain busy by keeping it guessing as to the kind of article you’ll post. Here are a few different article types to consider as you plan your calendar:
•How-to article
•Op-ed piece on an issue affecting your field, industry, or community
•Listicle (article in the form of a list)
•Book review
•Article by a guest blogger
•Challenge of a popular assumption or myth
•Case study
•Insider secrets
5.Include examples and stories. Regardless of the overall article format, spice up your content by incorporating examples and stories your audience will find relatable and persuasive. Become a story hunter, someone always on the lookout for great stories. Like Karen and Laurie, you might find stories through interactions with your target market. You might also tap into your life experience or draw on myths and folk tales.
6.Chunk and label. Make it easy for users to skim and scroll through your content. “Chunk” your content into short paragraphs, lists, and charts and visuals (if appropriate). Label each chunk by providing a heading or subheading. Your users, especially those viewing your blog from a mobile device, will appreciate being able to preview your content at a glance and absorb it quickly.
7.Emulate models. To become an all-star blogger, seek out popular blogs in your field or a related domain, analyze their content, and intentionally copy the approach. Here are some questions to help you identify aspects of your model blogs you can copy in your own posts:
•How long is the average post? (This can vary widely, and there’s no best practice that fits all situations. Keep in mind, though, that Google will only pick up on your content if your post runs to at least 300 words.)
•What kinds of articles does the blog include most often?
•What other kinds of articles does it feature?
•What headline formulas do posts use?
•How would you describe the voice of the blog?
•What style choices do you notice?
•How is graphic design applied to the blog (e.g., layout, font variations, color, visuals)?
•How do posts encourage the audience to engage with the company?
Here’s an example of a short blog post you can use to start your collection of articles to examine and emulate (Figure 6.2).
Figure 6.2 Sample blog post
Great blogs don’t just happen through creative serendipity; they develop through audience-focused intention and repeated practice. Follow the seven recommendations above, along with the other strategies and tips you’ve learned in this chapter, and you’ll be well on your way to establishing the powerful online presence your company deserves.
□Content aligned with the way the blog has been defined in terms of the PAVE method:
○What is the PURPOSE for the blog?
○Who is the ideal AUDIENCE?
○What VALUE do you want to offer?
○How do you want to ENGAGE with your audience?
□Distinct, consistent blog voice, aligned with the brand identity
□Topic related to key words that resonate with the target audience
□Topic relevant to the monthly theme (if applicable)
□Attention-grabbing headline
□Emotionally resonant visual(s)
□Strong first paragraph that states the post’s main idea
□Post format that creates variety in the blog
□Vivid example or story to bring the ideas to life
□Content chunked and labeled for easy skimming
□Call to action encouraging audience engagement