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Your Friend on the Web, Diana Ratliff

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Blogging

How to Write a Blog Post If You’re Not a Writer

Writing a Blog PostMany people freeze up when faced with the prospect of writing. Staring at a blank computer screen when you’re supposed to be writing a blog post about your company’s new Wonder Widget only makes it worse.  Here are some tips to make it easier!

  • Think of writing a blog post as an interview.  Say your favorite journalist is going to ask you five questions about your business. What are the questions, and how would you answer?
    Pretend you’re just talking to the reporter and write whatever you’d say.
    No editing at first – just write.  THEN clean it up a bit to make it easy to read, and voila! you have a blog post.
  • If a computer screen is too intimidating, get out the ol’ #2 pencil and a piece of paper.  Jot down a headline and maybe 5 bullet points.  Once you have an outline, it’s not too hard to just fill in the blanks.
  • Lists make great blog posts. What parent of a school-age child wouldn’t appreciate “10 Easy Ways to Get Your Kids to Do Their Homework”?
  • Go to Google News and search these top newspapers for the topic of your possible blog post.  You’ll probably find several good articles written by professional journalists.  Print them out, study what they say and how they say it. You’ll probably get some great ideas.
  • Comment on something you’ve read in another article, in the news, on a website, in an industry publication. You don’t have to come up with the idea – just reference what you read and voice your own opinion.

Finally  – give yourself permission to just do it.  You’ve got to trust that people will relate to what you write.  These days, adding fresh content to your website is too doggoned important – it’s just part of what you need to do when you market your business online.

You don’t have to write an epic, and you don’t have to sound like a technical writer.  Keep it short, keep it simple, make it easy to understand – and hit the PUBLISH button.

 

Ozark Cabins Website | WordPress Theme

I just finished a site for the owners of Rock Eddy Bluff Farm in Dixon, MO.  Owners Tom & Kathy Corey had been doing their website for years, and in their own words “it just grew like Topsy and before long there were loads of pages, a format that did not fit many computers, and a general lack of maintenance that was noticeable.”

Their goal was a modern, easy-to-manage website that still had the rustic feel of their country resort.  The site was built with a very user-friendly WordPress theme so that it was affordable as well as easy to manage themselves.  Tom is an avid blogger so we also connected their blog to their Facebook page and are still tweaking the settings on that.  I did a logo for them too.

Rock Eddy Bluff Farm

 

I really enjoyed doing this site and it sounds like a wonderful place to visit if you want to relax, de-stress and get away from the hustle and bustle for a while.  Some of these Ozark cabins and cottages are right out of the 1800s, what a refreshing change that would be!

 

Is your blog in the wrong location?

For optimal benefit – your blog should be on your website, on your domain name – NOT at blogger.com or blogspot.com.

I’ve talked to several business owners in the last week who are interested in hiring me for SEO (search engine optimization) work.

All have blogs – which is smart – but all have their blogs at blogspot.com.  Not so smart.

For maximum search engine benefit, your blog posts need to be on your own website, your own domain name.  In other words, your blog’s URL should be something like:

http://www.comoaccountant.com/blog/
instead of
http://comoaccountant.blogspot.com.

(No, linking TO your blog from your main website isn’t the same thing.)

If your blog is well-established and has been around a long time and has some good links to it and has some PageRank (in other words, if Google sees it as a popular/important site) – then it can be valuable, wherever it’s hosted.  And having a valuable site link back to your main site is a good thing.

BUT most blogs don’t get that big or that popular – and you lose the search engine benefit of having the blog posts on your own domain name.

You see, when you blog you’re adding keyword-rich content to your site, which the search engines love.  And you’re updating your site, showing the search engines that your content is fresh and relevant – which they ALSO love.

You’re most likely to be blogging at an external site if your primary site is built in HTML instead of in WordPress.  You have to install WordPress separately, which requires some technical expertise.  That’s how my site is set up right now; WordPress is installed in a subfolder of my domain.

However, I’m now converting my site to WordPress for the whole thing – and that’s one reason WordPress is such a popular site-building platform these days.  It has that blog functionality is built right in.

Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson, recommends installing your blog on your own domain – and that’s good enough for me.  If SEO is one of your major reasons for blogging, this is a change you ought to make.

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