If you’re a small business owner, creative or personal brand who’s struggling with visibility and would love to learn how to write better blogs to improve your reach and attract more of the right clients, then read on!
Let’s start at the beginning…
Having a catchy title that conveys power, emotion, action or success is a great place to start. Although, it’s often best to write your article first and then find a title that best fits your content.
(Just like your English teacher may have suggested you write your essay conclusion before the main body of the essay. It’s a great tip as it keeps you focused on what you’re really trying to say and not going off on a tangent… like I am right now!)
How to choose a great title…
In the past I’ve relied on my word whispering wit to choose blog titles, but while they may be quirky, funny or unique, they don’t really get me the high viewing stats I could be getting.
And when you write for a living, that’s kind of disappointing… and really stupid!
So I began researching ways to up my game and came across the Headline Analyzer tool by coschedule.com. It’s a free tool that gives you a score out of 100 for your headlines and allows you to easily make tweaks to your words to create the best, most attention-grabbing headlines to attract those dream clients or a bigger audience.
In the picture below, you can see I started with the title: ’10 ways to boost your blog’s performance’. It scored 71, which is within the ‘green’ band of potential success.
As a general rule, if it’s in green it’s good to go, but amber needs work and red is a no-go zone! However, being the eternal perfectionist I’m never happy with just being in the green so always play around as much as possible to get a score of 75+.
Anything over 80 usually has me dancing around the lounge to Jessie J’s ‘Masterpiece’.
Swapping ’10 Ways’ for ‘How to’ instantly upped the score to 78, while ‘How to make your blog attract more clients’ pipped it at the post with a fantastic 79.
Being specific with the type of clients I want to attract helped me get this title up to a whopping 83/100. (And yes, I’m actually listening to Jessie J right now!)
Note how switching from simple language to something a bit more ‘fancy’ actually reduces the score. KISS!
Subheadings are the shizzle!
Ever heard of title tags and H1, H2 headings? No, neither had I…
But once I started doing a little bit of research I found out that search engines (like Google) have specially trained bots that scan your blogs for information to check that you’re human, not spam and delivering what you say you’re delivering.
Based on their clever technology, you get ranked higher (or lower) depending on your content, which is what helps you become more visible when people search for the service, product or solution they need.
(Ok, that’s in really basic terms! Feel free to geek out on the technical wizardry in your spare time…)
In a nutshell, placing subheadings throughout your blogs not only makes it easier for your consumer to read (’cause everyone scan reads these days), it also makes your blog more likely to rank higher in Google SEO terms.
When you use WordPress (with the new block editor), it’s easy to tweak your text to use the H1 and H2 tags throughout your writing. Here’s a screen grab from WordPress that shows the heading above as an H2 …
While we’re talking tech, keywords are pretty important too…
It’s probably the reason someone named them ‘key’ words…
But we get so used to hearing these digital terms that we never stop to analyse what they really mean or how learning more about them might be useful to our online businesses and blogs.
Keywords act as a bridge between your client or audience and your blog or online business.
There are short tail keywords like: blogger, writer, copywriter.
And long tail keywords like: how to write better, how to make money as a writer or what is a copywriter?
Think about all the things you’ve ever searched for in Google….
That time you wanted to know how tall Aquaman is in real life, whether chocolate cake can be made calorie-free or how to get red wine stains out of carpet.
Your potential clients and customers are searching for information and solutions right now. The chance of them finding you and your business ranges from pretty small to ‘OMG I’m ranking on page 1 of Google!’.
Whether you decide to spend hours researching your company’s keywords or not is up to you, but when you’re writing blogs and articles for the internet do include words, phrases and sentences that you know people will be searching for. (Try it in your next blog and watch your stats increase!)
Let’s leave tech for a bit and look at …
How to write in a voice that aligns to your brand
This is where things get exciting for me!
I’m all about alignment, messaging and storytelling.
How to write in a way that captures your reader’s thoughts, worries and dreams and ensures that your words resonate deep in their heart.
Because when you make your reader feel stuff, that’s when the magic happens!
They want to know more about you, your brand, how you solved your problems (which means you can solve theirs too) and how they can work with you, buy your products or subscribe to your services.
Have you ever come across someone online for the very first time and just thought ‘YES!’, this person gets me!
He/she/they understand exactly why I’m struggling and what I need to make life better.
So, while this isn’t one of my usual ‘woo-woo’, earth-friendly, animal-loving, entrepreneurial blogs, it is shooting the arrow right into the heart of ‘Help! Why isn’t my blog performing well and what can I do to make it better?’
I understand where you’re struggling because I’ve struggled there too. I’ve found solutions that I’m sharing with you today so you too can up your blogging game and get noticed! (And more sales, obvs.)
Write consistently
Ok, I’ll admit, this is where I’m a bit ‘poop emoji’.
I get bursts of imagination and creativity and churn out blog after blog followed by weeks of client-focused work and a need to relax on the sofa with my fluffy bunnies hopping round, or a cat asleep on my lap, watching YouTube videos about tiny homes… (and probably best I don’t admit my latest time-drain – TikTok!)
Last November (2018), I decided to blog every day for a month and my website stats increased dramatically. Creating more content = more shares, a higher ranking on search engines and a greater possibility of ‘going viral’.
Weekly blogs are ideal but monthly blogs aren’t really enough.
My top tips?
- Create a library of content.
- Commit to posting new blogs on a set day each week.
- Use a scheduling tool to upload your blogs to save time.
- Batch create content to maintain focus and maximise your time.
- Give old blogs a makeover with updated content and a new title and repost them.
Use photos in your blog
Depending on your theme and content, adding one or two photos related to your blog (in addition to the cover photo) can greatly improve your reader’s enjoyment and how much time they spend on your site.
However, overdoing the photos (especially large file sizes) will lead to an infuriatingly slow loading blog and your reader will simply get bored and click on to something else.
(Let’s be honest, we’re all a little too impatient online these days!)
Add ALT tags to images
Ok, back to the technical stuff!
An ALT tag should describe your image and helps ‘screen readers’ create a better experience for the visually impaired.
It’s also used in SEO to check that the image relates to the text around it. Your ALT text is a great place for your keywords and phrases, but don’t over do it (keyword stuffing) or you’ll be seen as spammy.
In the wise words of Yoast.com, ‘When choosing alt text, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.’
Using Yoast for WordPress
Yoast is a clever little plugin that I should have added to my website wayyyy sooner! If you haven’t added it yet, I suggest you hop over to your WordPress site pretty quickly and install it. (It’s free!)
Yoast helps you to improve the readability and SEO ranking of your blog and is incredibly user friendly with a traffic light system to help you see instantly where you can improve your writing.
It also guides you to add snippets of text (a meta description) that your potential readers will see when they find you from an internet search. This catchy little pocket of 50-160 characters has the potential to make you seem more attractive and click-able. Just like the perfect online dating profile!
Backlinks, Internal links and CTAs
When someone stays to read your whole blog, that’s great.
But ideally you’d like them to hang around and read a second blog, or a third…
… or check out your ‘work with me’ page or view your retails products.
You might even want them to sign up to your email newsletter or join a waiting list for your sparkly new launch that’s ‘coming soon!’.
It’s important to make it CLEAR to your reader what they should do next before clicking off your page and onto another site.
In the online business world this is known as a call-to-action and can come at the end of a page – although it’s great to add a sprinkling of internal links or backlinks throughout.
(Promoting other people’s work is not only a lovely thing to do for them, it also helps you in the long run as others will notice your generosity and share your awesomeness too!)
For example:
- Find out more about X here.
- Sign up to my monthly newsletter or grab this freebie. (Sometimes on a pop-up)
- Enjoyed this blog? Then you’ll love this one!
- Need a copywriter? Check out all the ways we can work together.
- What are your thoughts? Comment below…
You may have noticed how I snuck in a couple of internal links to the list above. These are simple hyperlinks to other pages on your website. For example, to other blogs, to an About Page or even to your social media platforms if you’re aiming to get more people following you there.
Backlinks are very similar. These are used when your blog link is shared from outside of your website (i.e. from your social media channels), or from a third party – one of your raving fans perhaps! Collaborating with other online businesses and brands is a great way to have your work featured on other sites with backlinks directing people to your content.
Phew! We’re done!
How was it for you?
Did you learn something new? If so, I’d love to read your comments…
I’m most definitely not an expert in SEO, unlike the amazing SEO Sleuth Natalie Alleblas , and my blog has not yet reached the dizzy heights created by the incredible lifestyle and parenting blogger Vicki Psarias, founder of Honest Mum (and author, vlogger, film director and all round lovely person).
But…
I write from the heart, with love, compassion, empathy and a fundamental urge to teach and share all the information I’ve accrued over the past forty-something years.
My blog may not be reaching millions of people every month (yet!) but I’m going to put it out there and say that this blog will be my new highest performing blog on my website! (For now, anyway.)
Whether it ever outperforms ‘How to lose the baby weight’– a blog I wrote for Mummyology.co.uk back in 2012 – remains to be seen!
For now, I’ll leave you with this…
The best way to write better blogs that attract more of the right clients is to write consistently, sharing value in a way that resonates with your audience and using a few technical tips, tricks and tools to make your blog work harder for you.
A bit like investing money – once you know what to do with it, you can build wealth with less effort and spend more time with the people you love and doing the things that light you up – and less time at a J.O.B.
And if you’d like ME to write YOUR blogs…
All you need to do is hop over to my Work With Me page and find out about my ghost-blogging, article-writing services that enable you to outsource the very thing that may be stressing you out and bringing on grey hairs!
With regular, well-written blogs on your website you can supercharge your viewing stats and build a bigger audience of ideal clients who love what you do and are excited to be your cheerleaders.
Lorraine xx