#45 – Blogging for Profit

Vlogs, or video logs, and podcasting are becoming the buzzwords of the 21st century, aren’t they? But the written word is always going to have a special place. And blogging is always going to be very important, because as much as the search engines are going to be able to start transcribing video and podcasts, doing it straight from a blog, from the written word, is always going to be the easiest way.

So here are some tips and tricks for blogging to the best benefit for your business for the 21st century.

First, I recommend blogging every week. Yes, every single week, at a minimum. More if you can. There’s a lot of tools that you can use to help you with that. There’s a way to write a blog post even if you’re sitting around waiting for an appointment and have nothing to do. You could write a quick email that would automatically post your blog. You can do that now with WordPress,.

You can write a blog about an article that you read. Maybe you agree with this article and it’s something to do with your industry. Or maybe you don’t agree with it and you want to say why. Then you link to the article as well so people can read the article and understand why you are not agreeing with it.

Your Blog posts do not have to be huge. You can do small blog posts on a weekly basis.

But I do recommend doing a large blog post, at least 2-3000 words, two to three times a year.

And of course, you can hire a freelancer to do that. Why do it yourself? it’s a lot easier to edit a current article than it is to look at that blank page and try to figure out what to write isn’t it? Think about that. hire someone to do the first draft. Of course, you want to rewrite it, but hire someone else to do the first draft. Contact us if you would like help finding a good freelance content writer.

And always remember to share your blog posts to your social media; whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever it might be. Use plugins like Revive Old Posts that shares your blog posts on social media. But the most important thing to do with your blog. It’s not just writing weekly, not just large blog posts a couple times a year or sending them to social media.

Make sure that your blog posts are on topic for your business.

Now, they don’t have to be exactly about your business. I do SEO, but I do podcasts about general business stuff as well. You might be an architect, so you might do a blog post about how to keep your special house lasting longer, maybe repainting every once in a while or maybe using a certain kind of paint. Maybe you know of a certain stain on the deck that you write a short post about.

You might be an architect, but designing the house doesn’t mean that you can’t help your people keep their house in better condition over time.

Or if you’re a plumber, something you could write about might be whether to use those drain cleaners. Are they good for your pipes or bad for your pipes? It might get rid of the clog, but what damage might it be doing to the rest of your pipes.?

So things that people would be interested in are great blog posts. They don’t necessarily have to be sales blog posts. In fact, I don’t recommend doing sales blog posts.

Think of blog posts that you can write that will help your customers. And yeah, the more words, the better and the more likely the search engines will like it.

But here’s a trick: Let’s say you do a small blog post every week, and most of your blog posts are only, you know, 2-300 words. At the end of the year, maybe you have two large blog posts and all the rest of those 50 blog posts are all small.

Go back and look if you can find similar topics, take some of those smaller blog posts and combine them into one larger post.

So maybe at the end of each year or the beginning of each year, whichever it might be, pick a couple of hours to just go through all your blog posts from the year before and see what you can do to make some larger blog posts on different subjects. It’ll be a new blog post to the search engines, so they’ll look at it again. Plus, it’ll be combining a bunch of older blog posts, so you will delete all those out. The search engines are going to notice that you’re updating your website and getting rid of old content: They like that. So do that once a year.

So don’t worry about doing small blog posts, do one weekly. Try to keep them on topic as much as possible. Share them to social media, and once a year delete out your old blog posts and combine them into creating bigger blog posts.

– Dr. Ty Belknap, CEO, Port Bell SEO