How to start blogging for visibility
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The very idea of blogging may sound daunting on top of all your other critical tasks. But it can educate your clients in areas that matter to them, and show your passion and thought leadership.
If you are selling cyber security services, for example, you could write about managing cyber risks in supply chains. If you are an architect specialising in university buildings, write about some of the physical amenities students need to thrive on campus.
Blogging will humanise your company and lift you above the sea of anonymous brands. When you do it in the right way.
Getting started
A blank page can feel intimidating. Where do you start? Which is the main point to get across?
Thankfully, writing is technical as well as creative. Here is a checklist for your framework, so you can start to get creative.
Step 1. What’s your angle?
To secure your readers’ attention, you’ll need to hook them in with the very first sentence.
Ask yourself, ‘What’s in it for them?’ ‘Why would they care?’ And begin from there. This will frame your introduction, which will become the copy readers see on a Google search results page.
To extend your reach online, define your long-tail keywords, so that people looking for information about your topic can more easily find your article. Read more about search engine friendly pages.
Step 2. Know where you are heading
Map out your narrative so you know what you’re going to write. Then explore your topic in all its subtlety and complexity, sentence by sentence.
You can use the journalistic technique of the ‘inverted pyramid’ – story structure designed to grab people’s attention, so that they are drawn to read the rest of your article. This starts with the big ‘takeaway’ facts and follows with more and more detail.
It places the most important information at the top, so readers understand the main points, even if they don’t read the whole article.
Step 3. Choose the right blog length
How many words you write depends on your audience and the purpose of your article. If you have a professional audience, for example, who want to widen their knowledge about a topic, 800 to 1000 words would suit. If you write for a member of the public who is reading recreationally, 600 words can be ample.
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Step 4. Tone of voice
Be yourself and use plain English. Use the active voice and personal pronouns, and approach the writing as if you are holding a conversation with your reader.
For thought leadership articles, you want to tread a careful line which displays your expertise yet avoids being too technical. A good reference is some of the writing on museum websites. Curators write about complex topics, but make ideas very accessible, as they are used to translating the museum’s collection to a wide audience.
Step 5. Your blog post title
Your title should tell the reader something about the topic, but in a unique and intriguing way to draw them in.
Step 6. Think about readability
Many blog visitors read only the first sentence and then scan headings and links. We all do it. So for the skimmers and scanners, use your heading, first sentence and sub-headings to capture your key messages.
And remember, it’s harder to read from a screen than it is in print – studies show we are 20 per cent slower reading online. So keep your reader alert by using short sentences and paragraphs.
Step 7. Connect and hyperlink
By linking to related topics – pages within your website and to another websites – you become even more helpful and useful to your readers. External links also help increase your website’s search engine rankings.
Finally, how much time does it take?
While a subject expert can probably write a good article in half a day, for an intermediate-level team member, or for a longer thought-piece, allow at least a day. And don’t forget all the incidentals such as finding and sizing images, adding keywords and metadata, then loading and formatting the page.