How to be a blogging pro

You may not have a website and do all your marketing activities on social media and on third-party sites? If so, you may want to consider setting up your own website that you can call home to have control over your content.

If you do have a website you may have included a “blog” on your website, but it could be some much more than a dreary update of “news” on an ad hoc basis.

Have you considered making a blog part of your professional identity and being a blogging pro?

Here are some steps to help you get started with being a Blogging Pro:

01 Have a strong brand

To get started make sure that you have a strong  “brand” and an “identity”.

If you don’t think it is strong enough – think about how to can make it stronger. Do your own thing and be authentic.

Once you have a strong identity – use the name and identity on your website and across all social media platforms. Make the branding and the images consistent. This includes things like using the same fonts and colour palette in all your content and using a consistent quality, style and tone.

This should form part of your overall (consistent) identity.

02 Have a clear purpose

What is the purpose of your blog?

When setting up and using your blog think about:

• what you are wanting to achieve with your blog
• how you are going to use your blog
• how you are going to use your blog and social media together.

This could be grand plans for using your blog as a professional business and blog. Alternatively, it could be simply making your blogging activities more professional and complimentary alongside your existing business to help drive traffic to your website.

For example: If you are using your blog as an extension of your website you might use your blog to share advice or to personalise/humanise your business.

03 Know your Customer

As well as having an understanding of the purpose of your blog, you also need to know and understand your customer (target audience) and their needs.

Your blog and the content on your blog needs to suit your customer to help build your blog, build your community and drive sales. Therefore it is very important that you know who you are talking to.

Do your research and make sure you know who your customer is and why they are coming to your blog. Think about specific people that are coming to your blog (not just categories and types) and create specific customer personas.

Build up your relationships with your customers and the potential customers in your audience first through quality content (more on that below) before selling to hard. Otherwise you will just drive them away. No one particularly likes being sold to all the time.

04 Plan your content

Now that you have an agreed purpose for your blog and you know your audience you can start planning out your content. This might mean that you have a particular point of view/voice and offer regular commentary. This might mean that you have a theme that you write about (people like to know what they are getting).

To appear professional you should post on your blog on a regular and consistent basis: daily, weekly, monthly. It should not be an ad hoc activity.

The easiest way to do this is to plan out your content and to plan it out in advance. Part of your plan should be planning out the content type (can be a mix) and who you are talking to.

An easy way to do this is to create a content calendar and pre-schedule in advance where you can.

To save time think about how you can create your content in a streamlined and formatted fashion. Think about whether you want to stick to a particular type of content and set a time/day to make your content. If you schedule content creating and blogging into your life it will make it easier to create and manage your content.

Don’t get deterred by lack of engagement when you first get started keep writing and creating content – over time this will lead to sales.

If you want the same content to drive regular traffic – make sure you include regular evergreen content and reuse, republish and repurpose it on your social media platforms on a regular basis.

05 Promote your content

Creating content is only part of the story. As well as creating content you also need to promote it. so expect to spend just as much time of not more on promotion. Use evergreen content and repeat and reuse promotions. Preschedule promotions.

As well as promoting content add value when you are online – don’t waste your “downtime” internet browsing. Be fun and engage with people when they are in the mood to engage with you.

06 Be realistic about how to drive sales

While you shouldn’t get deterred by a lack of engagement – you also need to be realistic about how to drive sales and collect and analyse the data to back it up.

People also need to find you in the first place – so when you are getting started… tell people how to find you.

Your blog (and social media) is a great way to drive sales. This can be by using social media to drive traffic to your website, using an opt-in to get mailing list sign-ups, using your blog (writing) to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge and using the website to take your customer on a journey.

However, you can’t just sell.

Part of your blogging and social media strategy should also be to engage in conversation.

An authentic and personal voice is what brings people back to your website/blog/social media feed – so make conversation!