HOW TO WRITE A BLOGPOST

You've probably heard how paramount blogging is to the success of your marketing. Without it, your SEO will tank, you'll have nothing to promote in social media, you'll have no clout with your leads and customers, and you'll have fewer pages to put those valuable calls-to-action that generate inbound leads. Need I say more?

So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can't consistently blog? Maybe because, unless you're one of the few people who actually like writing, business blogging kind of stinks. You have to find words, string them together into sentences, and ughhh where do you even start? 

Download our free blog post templates here to learn how to write 5 different types of blog posts. 

Well my friend, the time for excuses is over.

After you read this post, there will be absolutely no reason you can't blog every single day -- and do it quickly. Not only am I about to provide you with a simple blogging formula to follow, but I'm also going to give you free templates for creating five different types of blog posts:

• The How-To Post
• The List-Based Post
• The Curated Collection Post
• The SlideShare Presentation Post
• The Newsjacking Post

With all this blogging how-to, literally anyone can blog as long as they truly know the subject matter they're writing about. And since you're an expert in your industry, there's no longer any reason you can't sit down every day and hammer out an excellent blog post.

How to Write a Blog Post: A Simple Formula to Follow

Step 1: Understand your audience.

Before you start to write, have a clear understanding of your target audience. What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? This is where creating your buyer personas comes in handy. Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests while you're coming up with a topic for your blog post.

For instance, if your readers are millennials looking to start their own business, you probably don't need to provide them with information about getting started in social media -- most of them already have that down. You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their approach to social media from a more casual, personal one to a more business-savvy, networking-focused approach. That kind of tweak is what separates you from blogging about generic stuff to the stuff your audience really wants (and needs) to hear.

Don't have buyer personas in place for your business? Here are a few resources to help you get started:

• Create Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Template]
• Blog Post: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
• MakeMyPersona.com [Free Tool]

Step 2: Start with a topic and working title.

Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start with. For example, if you're a plumber, you might start out thinking you want to write about leaky faucets. Then you might come up with a few different working titles -- in other words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing.  For example, you might decide to narrow your topic to "Tools for Fixing Leaky Faucets" or "Common Causes of Leaky Faucets." A working title is specific and will guide your post so you can start writing.

Let's take a real post as an example: "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post." Appropriate, right? The topic, in this case, was probably simply "blogging." Then the working title may have been something like, "The Process for Selecting a Blog Post Topic." And the final title ended up being "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post."

See that evolution from topic, to working title, to final title? Even though the working title may not end up being the final title (more on that in a moment), it still provides enough information so you can focus your blog post on something more specific than a generic, overwhelming topic.

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas, check out this blog post from my colleague Ginny Soskey. In this post, Soskey walks through a helpful process for turning one idea into many. Similar to the "leaky faucet" example above, she suggests that you "iterate off old topics to come up with unique and compelling new topics." This can be done by:

• Changing the topic scope
• Adjusting the time frame
• Choosing a new audience
• Taking a positive/negative approach
• Introducing a new format

Step 3: Write an intro (and make it captivating).

We've written more specifically about writing captivating introductions in the post, "How to Write an Introduction [Quick Tip]," but let's review, shall we?

First, grab the reader's attention. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs -- or even sentences -- of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they've given your post a fair shake. You can do this in a number of ways: tell a story or a joke, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.

Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives. Here's an example of a post that we think does a good job of attracting a reader's attention right away:

Step 4: Organize your content.

Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information -- for the reader and the writer. The trick is to organize the info so readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. The organization can take multiple forms -- sections, lists, tips, whatever's most appropriate. But it must be organized!

Let's take a look at the post, "How to Use Snapchat: A Detailed Look Into HubSpot’s Snapchat Strategy." There is a lot of content in this post, so we broke it into a few different sections using the following headers: How to Setup Your Snapchat Account, Snaps vs. Stories: What's the Difference?, and How to Use Snapchat for Business. These sections are then separated into sub-sections that to go into more detail and also make the content easier to read.

To complete this step, all you really need to do is outline your post. That way, before you start writing, you know which points you want to cover, and the best order in which to do it. To make things even easier, you can also download and use our free blog post templates, which are pre-organized for five of the most common blog post types. Just fill in the blanks! 

Step 5: Write!

The next step -- but not the last -- is actually writing the content. We couldn't forget about that, of course.

Now that you have your outline/template, you're ready to fill in the blanks. Use your outline as a guide and be sure to expand on all of your points as needed. Write about what you already know, and if necessary, do additional research to gather more information, examples, and data to back up your points, providing proper attribution when incorporating external sources. Need help finding accurate and compelling data to use in your post? Check out this roundup of sources -- from Pew Research to Google Trends.

If you find you're having trouble stringing sentences together, you're not alone. Finding your "flow" can be really challenging for a lot of folks. Luckily, there are a ton of tools you can lean on to help you improve your writing. Here are a few to get you started:

• Power Thesaurus: Stuck on a word? Power Thesaurus is a crowdsourced tool that provides users with a ton of alternative word choices from a community of writers. 
• ZenPen: If you're having trouble staying focused, check out this distraction-free writing tool. ZenPen creates a minimalist "writing zone" that's designed to help you get words down without having to fuss with formatting right away.
• Cliché Finder: Feeling like your writing might be coming off a little cheesy? Identify instances where you can be more specific using this handy cliché tool. 

For a complete list of tools for improving your writing skills, check out this post. And if you're looking for more direction, the following resources are chock-full of valuable writing advice:

• The Marketer's Pocket Guide to Writing Well [Free Ebook]
• How to Write Compelling Copy: 7 Tips for Writing Content That Converts
• How to Write With Clarity: 9 Tips for Simplifying Your Message
• Your Blog Posts Are Boring: 9 Tips for Making Your Writing More Interesting
• Your Blog Posts Are Boring: 9 Tips for Making Your Writing More Interesting

Step 6: Edit/proofread your post, and fix your formatting.

You're not quite done yet, but you're close! The editing process is an important part of blogging -- don't overlook it. Ask a grammar-conscious co-worker to copyedit and proofread your post, and consider enlisting the help of The Ultimate Editing Checklist. And if you're looking to brush up on your own self-editing skills, turn to these helpful posts for some tips and tricks to get you started:

• Confessions of a HubSpot Editor: 11 Editing Tips From the Trenches
• How to Become a More Efficient Editor: 12 Ways to Speed Up the Editorial Process
• 10 Simple Edits That'll Instantly Improve Any Piece of Writing 

When you're ready to check your formatting, keep the following advice in mind ... 

Featured Image 

Make sure you choose a visually appealing and relevant image for your post. As social networks treat content with images more prominently, visuals are now more responsible than ever for the success of your blog content in social media. In fact, it's been shown that content with relevant images receives 94% more views than content without relevant images.

For help selecting an image for your post, read "How to Select the Perfect Image for Your Next Blog Post" -- and pay close attention to the section about copyright law.

Visual Appearance

No one likes an ugly blog post. And it's not just pictures that make a post visually appealing -- it's the formatting and organization of the post, too. 

In a properly formatted and visually appealing blog post, you'll notice that header and sub-headers are used to break up large blocks of text -- and those headers are styled consistently. Here's an example of what that looks like:

Also, screenshots should always have a similar, defined border (see screenshot above for example) so they don't appear as if they're floating in space. And that style should stay consistent from post to post.

Maintaining this consistency makes your content (and your brand) look more professional, and makes it easier on the eyes.

Topics/Tags

Tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post. They also allow readers to browse for more content in the same category on your blog. Refrain from adding a laundry list of tags to each post. Instead, put some thought into a tagging strategy. Think of tags as "topics" or "categories," and choose 10-20 tags that represent all the main topics you want to cover on your blog. Then stick to those. 

Step 7: Insert a call-to-action (CTA) at the end.

At the end of every blog post, you should have a CTA that indicates what you want the reader to do next -- subscribe to your blog, download an ebook, register for a webinar or event, read a related article, etc. Typically, you think about the CTA being beneficial for the marketer. Your visitors read your blog post, they click on the CTA, and eventually you generate a lead. But the CTA is also a valuable resource for the person reading your content -- use your CTAs to offer more content similar to the subject of the post they just finished reading.

In the blog post, "What to Post on Instagram: 18 Photo & Video Ideas to Spark Inspiration," for instance, readers are given actionable ideas for creating valuable Instagram content. At the end of the post is a CTA referring readers to download a comprehensive guide on how to use Instagram for business:

See how that's a win-win for everyone? Readers who want to learn more have the opportunity to do so, and the business receives a lead they can nurture ... who may even become a customer! Learn more about how to choose the right CTA for every blog post in this article. And check out this collection of clever CTAs to inspire your own efforts.

Step 8: Optimize for on-page SEO.

After you finish writing, go back and optimize your post for search.

Don't obsess over how many keywords to include. If there are opportunities to incorporate keywords you're targeting, and it won't impact reader experience, do it. If you can make your URL shorter and more keyword-friendly, go for it. But don't cram keywords or shoot for some arbitrary keyword density -- Google's smarter than that!

Here's a little reminder of what you can and should look for:

Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the descriptions below the post's page title on Google's search results pages. They provide searchers with a short summary of the post before clicking into it. They are ideally between 150-160 characters and start with a verb, such as "Learn," "Read," or "Discover." While meta descriptions no longer factor into Google's keyword ranking algorithm, they do give searchers a snapshot of what they will get by reading the post and can help improve your clickthrough rate from search.

Page Title and Headers

Most blogging software uses your post title as your page title, which is the most important on-page SEO element at your disposal. But if you've followed our formula so far, you should already have a working title that will naturally include keywords/phrases your target audience is interested in. Don't over-complicate your title by trying to fit keywords where they don't naturally belong. That said, if there are clear opportunities to add keywords you're targeting to your post title and headers, feel free to take them. Also, try to keep your headlines short -- ideally, under 65 characters -- so they don't get truncated in search engine results.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the word or words that link to another page -- either on your website or on another website. Carefully select which keywords you want to link to other pages on your site, because search engines take that into consideration when ranking your page for certain keywords.

It's also important to consider which pages you link to. Consider linking to pages that you want to rank well for that keyword. You could end up getting it to rank on Google's first page of results instead of its second page, and that ain't small potatoes.

Mobile Optimization

With mobile devices now accounting for nearly 2 out of every 3 minutes spent online, having a website that is responsive or designed for mobile has become more and more critical. In addition to making sure your website's visitors (including your blog's visitors) have the best experience possible, optimizing for mobile will score your website some SEO points.

Back in 2015, Google made a change to its algorithm that now penalizes sites that aren't mobile optimized. This month (May 2016), Google rolled out their second version of the mobile-friendly algorithm update -- creating a sense of urgency for the folks that have yet to update their websites. To make sure your site is getting the maximum SEO benefit possible, check out this free guide: How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: SEO Tips for a Post-"Mobilegeddon" World.

Step 9: Pick a catchy title.

Last but not least, it's time to spruce up that working title of yours. Luckily, we have a simple formula for writing catchy titles that will grab the attention of your reader. Here's what to consider:

1. Start with your working title.
2. As you start to edit your title, keep in mind that it's important to keep the title accurate and clear.
3. Then, work on making your title sexy -- whether it's through strong language, alliteration, or another literary tactic.
4. If you can, optimize for SEO by sneaking some keywords in there (only if it's natural, though!).
5. Finally, see if you can shorten it at all. No one likes a long, overwhelming title -- and remember, Google prefers 65 characters or fewer before it truncates it on its search engine results pages.

If you've mastered the steps above, learn about some way to take your blog posts to the next level in this post. What other steps do you take to refine your blog posts? Don't forget to download your five free blog post templates right here.

Credit Goes to  Rachel Sprung | @rsprung for this amazing article

This post is dedicated to Ravi Navik and Herman Jadhav for engaging so fully. Thanks guys.  Please comment, like and subscribe guys.  All comments are responded to on the same day.

How To Build Your First Online Assett In 48 Hours

For all of my talk about the three step process of building a business, there’s something to be said for the fact that it’s so freaking easy these days to start something – right now.

Recently I went to a conference here in Portland put on by Jason Glaspey called Tiny Startup Camp.

The idea?

Start a tiny business by the end of the weekend.

There were speakers, and plenty of people there to help, but the entire concept was built around the idea that you don’t need funding, crazy tech skills, or 99% of the things that keep most people from starting a business.

All you need is an idea, a few bucks, and an afternoon to put the whole thing together.

That’s a powerful concept.

Why Build An Asset? What Does That Even Mean?

Over the past couple months I’ve talked a lot about how most people go about building businesses in the wrong way. They start at the end, before they have any clue what they’re doing.

Well now, I’m gonna hit you with some knowledge that will be completely contradictory to all that other stuff – so hear me out, while keeping all of that in the back of your mind.

Time and time again I hear excuses like these:

• “I don’t have a good idea”
• “I know I need to start, but it’s just so daunting”
• “I want to start something, but I don’t know how”

The list goes on, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Even my three step method of: building skills, freelancing, then building your own projects, will take some time.  For some people without tangible steps and guidelines it can be really difficult to feel like you’re making progress – and thus can be difficult to build confidence in your ability to start something on your own.

So how about we change that?

This post is going to go in depth and teach you everything you need to know in order to build an online asset, or the beginnings of a tiny startup in one afternoon.

What’s an asset exactly?

By the time you’re done with this, you’ll have a site that’s up, allows you to capture leads, test your idea, and see if there’s an actual business anywhere in there.

Simply having this site setup is an asset.  Maybe you’re creative and come up with a killer domain name.  Maybe the domain sucks, but it’s a great idea and a thousand people sign up and say they’re interested.  Maybe you found the perfect combination of keywords that lead to great SEO rankings.

Any of those things are building the value the asset – ie your new site.

Whether you develop the asset, sit on it forever, or sell it later on, you’ve got something you didn’t have before. You’ve put all of the essential online business skills into practice.

And most importantly:

By the time we’re done here you will have done somehing. You’ll have made something real, and built your confidence along the way.

Does This Have to Be a Business?

While building this asset, you may be wondering if this constitutes a business.  You could be asking yourself “what’s the point? What am I getting out of this?”

Putting the confidence and skill building aside, let’s look at a couple quick examples of this.

One of my tiny startup ideas is Best Hotel Suites. I love the domain (Thanks, Max) but I haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to do with it.

So in the meantime, I put up a cool landing page and I’m leveraging it.  I’ve used that domain to score free (or greatly reduced) hotel rooms all over the world.

When the site launches in whatever form it will, I’ll promote all of the places I’ve gotten rooms for, but in the meantime I’ve used it to benefit an interest of mine.

Same with Breaking Eighty. Haven’t launched yet, but have still scored some free golf products from it.

Are these businesses?

Maybe, maybe not. Right now, they certainly aren’t.  But that doesn’t mean they aren’t assets that I can use to my advantage!

So, let’s get this rolling. In the steps that follow I’ll show you exactly what you need to do to build out this first asset – what you do after that is totally up to you, but if this is your first business or venture online, I promise you’ll feel more confident, empowered, and excited by the time all is done.

Step #1: Pick a Domain 

First thing’s first: don’t over think this.

Right now, this is more important as an exercise than a business. If I were you, I’d come up with a domain name around something you’re interested in or a hobby. This will make it more fun for you throughout the process.

Don’t think of this as anything more than an experiment and exercise that you’re doing today. Who knows what it’ll become in the future, but don’t worry much about that.

Focus on a basic idea.  Here are some examples:

• Ebook teaching people how to
• Video course teaching people to play the trumpet
• Reviews of the top 100 golf courses in the country
• How to setup a completely wireless home theater

Step #2: Buy a Domain

It doesn’t matter where you do this, but Hover is one of the best companies out there for this type of stuff. May be a little more expensive than major competitors, but I’ve found it to be worth it.  I also use Name Cheap on a regular basis as well – as their name says, cheaper than most.

Step #3: Setup Hosting

If you’re reading this blog you should have no excuse for not having a hosting account.  You can often get them for as cheap as $36/year.  While it may not be the best hosting, if you’re just getting started, really anything will do.

I recommend Bluehost for the majority of you, it’s affordable, reliable and has great customer service. If you’re willing to spend a bit more money, WPEngine is also a great host.

Step #4: Point Nameservers

All you’re doing here is telling your domain registrar which hosting account to point the domain to.  Regardless of what hosting you use, there should be pretty clear instructions for how to do this.

Step #5: Install WordPress

Once again, any basic hosting account should have a one-click install WordPress.  Login to your hosting dashboard, follow the instructions, and within 2 minutes, you’ll have a fresh WordPress install, thats ready to go!

Step #6: Install Theme

Ok, now this is where we can take our little exercise one of two directions.

One direction would be to actually setup and install a blog theme, and start writing content.  But that takes more dedication, more time, and we don’t even know if this is going to be a feasible idea yet.  So while you can totally grab a Woo Theme or Theme Forest theme, I recommend going the landing page route.

All this means is we are going to put up a sexy landing page and capture email addresses of people who are interested in what you’re offering.  Even right now, I have three different ideas I’m testing:

• Best Hotel Suites
• Breaking Eighty

Don’t look half bad, right? They took about 20 minutes each to set up.

Here’s what you do:

1. Download Launch Effect
2. Install Launch Effect
3. Find a big, beautiful photo relating to your site
4. Use these tips for getting the site setup.  And these instructions for getting that cool transparent effect.

Step #7: Sign Up for Mailchimp

Ok now that you’ve got a sexy look landing page, time to actually make that email list do something useful.  I personally use Aweber, but Mailchimp is cheaper starting out, and is one less monthly expense while you’re starting up.

Follow the instructions for setting up a new list in Mailchimp, and then pop into Launch Effect and use the integration tools to get it all setup.

Now you have a way to build a list, offer something for free via email, and gauge interest for your new project.

Step #8: Setup Google Analytics

This is pretty easy to do, but absolutely essential.  This is how you’ll track whether or not people are coming to your site, help you figure out what your conversion rates are, and help you optimize for the search engines.

Here’s Google’s checklist for getting all setup. Here’s a simplified walk through.

Step #9: Setup Social Accounts

If this is a brand that you’re really hoping to grow and evolve, you’ll want to make sure you procure the necessary social accounts as quickly as possible. Twitter handles, Facebook pages, Pinterest, you name it.

Even if you’re not sure you’ll use it, grab it anyway. Better to control everything relating to your brand then have someone else be able to mess with you later on.

Congratulations on Your New Web Asset!

Congratulations! You could do nothing else from here, and you still will have an asset that you can leverage in the future.

However, this is a good time to look at some of the options for what you could actually do with this asset now that it exists.

Let’s take a look at how I’ve been leveraging my sites as they currently stand.

Best Hotel Suites

I’ve had this site up for the last 4 months, and essentially I’ve been using it to build up a barrage of hotel reviews.  At some point I’m going to launch this site.  I’ll have some kind of blog component where I review high end hotels and suites.

I haven’t completely decided what else the site will contain, but I know in one form or another it will have those reviews.

So how does this help me?

Well anytime I travel I email some hotels, I tell them what I’m doing, and ask if they’d be willing to give me a room in exchange for a review.

So far I’m batting about 25% on room offers.  Pretty freaking good if you ask me!  This one site which took me about an hour total to get completely setup has saved me at least $1k in hotel costs.

File under: Hacking the High Life

Not to mention I then get to write about a topic I like, and build a relationship with the establishments.  Just make sure you’re up front about your plan with the sites, and don’t promise anything you can’t deliver on.

Breaking Eighty

Same drill as above, except Breaking Eighty will probably be my next site to launch. I’ve already received review copies of some awesome golf products (and written in depth reviews on them).

This site has solely been a way for me to turn my love of golf into a business.  We’ll see what shape it actually takes as we move into the new year, but I’m pretty excited about it.  That said, even as it stands I’ve had a surprising amount of success in forming relationships with golf companies.

Does This Spark Any Ideas?

Those are a couple ways I’ve leveraged similar assets.  Here are some of the other things this exercise can do for you:

• Serve as a squeeze page for an upcoming product launch
• Vehicle for testing an email series on a smaller audience
• Build your confidence and skills for setting up WordPress websites
• Turn these landing pages into a service you offer

The options are really endless.  Now that the latest versions of Launch Effect integrate with both Aweber and Mailchimp, it’s easier than ever to get something useful set up.

Advanced Asset Building Steps

So we’ve covered some of the basic things you need to do in order to get the very basics of an online asset created.  However how can we apply some advanced strategies to this in order to test ideas faster or scale into a larger project?

Optional Step #10: Find a More Permanent Theme and Install Theme Test Drive

One of the primary ways I leverage Launch Effect is to use it for the above reasons while I’m building out a larger scale project.

How do you do this? I usually find a premium theme that has the general look and feel that I want for my new website or blog.  I install it on the blog, and then download and install the plugin Theme Test Drive.

What does this do?

It makes it so that when I’m logged in, it shows me one theme, but it shows everyone else a different theme.

In this case it will show the average user the basic landing page, while I can write content and build out the primary site.  Once everything is done and ready to launch all I have to do is turn off the plugin and activate my primary theme.

It took me 2 years to find a good way of doing this, and this is without a doubt the best thing I’ve found.

Optional Step #11: Send Adwords Traffic for Testing

Have a fantastic idea, but aren’t sure if everyone else thinks it’s as awesome as you do?  Test it.

Fire up some Google Adwords or Facebook ads and start driving a little bit of traffic to the site.  Usually with a couple hundred dollars of ad spend you’ll get a sense of whether or not people will want to buy your product or service.

There’s a good chance if you drive traffic directly to a Launch Effect landing page, your account will get flagged. So the best way to actually test an idea is to put up a sales page.  Every time someone hits the buy button count that as a sale, and just give them a message that the product is in the works and you’ll notify them when it’s live.

The easiest way to get a good looking sales page setup is with Optimize Press. The entire Location Rebel site is actually built on this framework.

In order to assure you’re not banned make sure you include a disclaimer, privacy policy, and if possible, a phone number.

Next Steps…

There are all sorts of ways you can move forward from here, the goal of this exercise was just to build confidence in your ability to build something online.

In the future, you can use this method to build out the beginnings of real online business ideas.

However, if you’ve read my articles in the past, you know that I don’t think this is necessarily the best business strategy when you’re just getting started.

You’re better off building some skills first.

So let your new found asset simmer for awhile.  Go build the other key tennets of a good business first, and then when you’ve got some traction come back to your new asset, or create a new one using this process and launch the hell out of it.

Have you built an online asset before? Tell us about it!

Thank you to SEAN OGLE for this incredible article