Writing blog posts is a lucrative form of content marketing for small business owners. Every day people are searching for solutions to their individual problems on the Internet. Blog posts often show up in search results and are a great way to get organic clicks on a website. Before you begin writing blog posts and other articles, you need to ask your clients these three important questions.
Who is Your Ideal Customer?
Gathering information about your client’s ideal customer is key to writing an effective blog post. If the article is not relatable in any way to your client’s potential customer, they are simply going to pass it by. They won’t even give it a second thought. This information will be helpful in creating these items, which will attract the ideal customer’s attention, and increase the chances of them clicking on your client’s website:
- Blog title.
- Subheadings.
- Meta description.
What is the Problem You’re Trying to Solve?
Now that you have information on your client’s ideal customer (also known as “buyer persona”) you need to know what problem your client is trying to solve. The more specific they can get, the more each blog post will speak to the potential customer. This information will assist you in creating blog categories and topics that will be beneficial for visitors to your client’s website. For example, let’s say your client offers social media management services. As that is quite a broad category, you can ask questions that will pinpoint the type of social media management solutions they offer, such as:
- What are the top three social media platforms you work with?
- Do you also create graphics and images that correspond with the social media posts you create?
- Are there specific posting schedules you recommend for your clients?
How Will Your Solution Help Their Problem?
Value, value, and more value are what will keep people reading your client’s blog posts. The key here is to create valuable information that leads to sales. You don’t want to give so much value that the potential customer has no need for your client’s services. A good rule of thumb is to write blog posts that will help potential clients make that firm decision to hire or shop from your client. Types of blog posts that work best for this are:
- Personal testimonials from previous customers.
- Helpful tools or tips that can benefit the ideal customer.
- Question and answer type articles that address specific problems.
Always Remember the Purpose of a Blog Post
The purpose of a blog post is to use helpful and valuable content to make a potential customer into a loyal customer. If you remember, along with these three questions, the purpose of a blog post, you will have no problem crafting and writing blog articles for your clients. As long as you are writing with these three things in mind – the ideal customer, the problem to solve, and the solution for the problem – your client will have consistent, valuable blog posts to use for marketing their business.
Would you like to add SEO optimization and keyword research to your list of services? Take advantage of our Google Keyword Planner training video. After watching this video, you’ll understand the basics of how Google Keyword Planner works and how to use it for your client’s SEO as well as your own.