I often host a WordPress Meetup. One of the advantages of WordPress is the CMS platform that allows you to blog. Unfortunately, few clients take advantage of this great opportunity. Because blogging is something that people can do, regardless of their business, I thought this would be a great topic for this group.

Reasons for Starting a Blog

1. Google loves blogs – Google crawls your pages and it will be listed on Google search. Search engines bring new people to your blog.
2. Blogging improves your writing and builds your confidence.
3. Blogging helps other people. You spread information and knowledge to other people, give them ideas and solutions.
4. Self-Promotion. When you blog you have a tool to help promote yourself.
5. Helps you grow your business. When potential clients read interesting stories about your company or success they feel confident in your abilities. Companies who blog have 97% more inbound links.
6. Sharpens your powers of observation. It challenges you to look beyond the obvious and ask questions when everyone else is nodding their heads.

Reasons for Not Starting a Blog

1. Takes time away from your life and/or business. Blogging does take time, but so does marketing, Facebook posting, and cleaning the toilet
2. I don’t want to offend anyone. The fact is that people who are offended by something you say contribute to your blog because they start a discussion.
3. I don’t feel confident about my writing skills. Blogging actually improves your writing skills, and there are lots of tools to help keep you from making those big mistakes.

Keys to Success

• Have a strategy. Every blog post should help fulfill one of your strategic goals.
• Spy on your competition. Everyone has a blog in their niche that they are envious of. Observe other bloggers and try to emulate what you like about their blog.
• Write about your problems and how you solved them. Talk about your mistakes and how they affected you.
• Break down your topic. For example, imagine you were writing about how to find the perfect fixer-upper. You could break down the article into searching, evaluating, buying, fixing, selling, etc. Then you break down the topic searching into: where to look, what to look for, who can help, etc.
• Create an Editorial Calendar. Maybe you want a “Throwback Thursday” post that encourages people to engage with your post, for example.
• Get a series of tools in place to help you, write better, schedule better & post better.

Tips from Carly the Prepster

BLOGGING TIPS from a Full Time Blogger | What you need to know before you start a blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnX9INqSflA

Coming up with Blogging Ideas

• Write reviews. Everyone has an opinion about something. Maybe you’ve just purchased a product you enjoy or read a book. One of my clients has a successful blog reviewing cookbooks. She actually cooks the dishes in the cookbook she is reviewing and publishes her experience.
• Observe your customers. Answer questions you are frequently asked. Go in-depth with your answers and follow the topic breakdown methodology listed earlier.
• Interview an expert. Find someone who is an expert in their field and interview them. Another trick I like to use is to listen to a podcast. You get great idea’s, great quotes and other information that will fill out your blog and help you and your readers learn something.
• Use Auto RSS feeds to supplement. I use an RSS Feed Aggregator to provide great content for clients who don’t have time to blog. You have to find other blogs and websites that provide an RSS feed and then use the plugin to filter and publish their content.
• Use a Content Idea Generator. Just type in a few key words and let the content idea generator give you some interesting topics. https://www.impactbnd.com/blog-title-generator/blogabout using “Blogging”:
  • 5 Blogging Tools You Can’t Live Without
  • 7 Blogging Habits that Boost Engagement
  • How to Improve your Blogging Game with a Tool

Tools to Help Build a Better Blog

• Title Maker https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker helps you build a title and is entertaining
• Title Generator http://www.title-generator.com/index.php/best-online-title-generator.html will give you a long list of potential titles.
• Inbound Now https://www.inboundnow.com/apps/kill-writers-block/ is the easiest to use because you don’t even have to come up with a keyword
• Tweak Your Biz https://tweakyourbiz.com/title-generator also has a great blog title generator

Other Tools

• Grammarly is an App that installs on my browser. It corrects grammatical errors in my writing regardless as to where I am typing. I could not do without Grammarly.
• Hemingwayapp.com allows you to type your entire article and will give you a score to help you improve your content.
• Mailchimp.com will help you distribute your blog to others. The advantages to a newsletter service are that the people that subscribe to your newsletter really want to hear from you. If you set your newsletter up to read the RSS feed from your blog it will generate automatically.
• SNAP Auto Poster will publish your blog posts to any and many social media platforms. I use the paid version of this plugin so I can post to multiple Facebook pages.

I hope this has been a helpful article for you. I know it has inspired me to write more of my own articles. If you found this helpful and would like to hear more, I hope you will sign up for my newsletter or show up for one of our WordPress Meetups. Let me know about your next article in the comments below and I will add it to my Facebook feed.

Happy Blogging!