You’re going to write a blog post? That’s fantastic! Blogging is incredibly important for a lot of reasons, of which you are hopefully familiar. In this article, I’m going to provide you a few quick tips to make your blog article really shine.

First:

When you’re choosing to write your article, don’t write specifically about a product you sell or service you provide. Rather, write about a question your potential client may be asking. Answer their question, and you’ll hopefully gain their business in the long run. For example, you’re potential client may be a new parent trying to figure out when to start taking her child to the dentist. She’s not looking for a specific dentist (yet) so she Google something like “at what age should my child start seeing the dentist?” If you’re a local dentist who has written a blog article about that particular topic, there’s a really good chance that Google will serve up your article as a result for her search. Will it result in a new client? Probably not immediately, but she may follow your blog or even like you on facebook so that when the time does come for her to choose her pediatric dentist, your practice gets a really good shot at earning her business.

So write down some of the questions your clients are asking on a regular basis. See if you can come up with twelve. Now spend the next three months writing up answers to those questions and you’ve got a fourth of the year’s content done.

B.

Write awesome content. Don’t just blog because someone told you to blog. Stop creating “internet pollution” with content that isn’t valuable. Yes, blogging is an SEO strategy. That’s true. But Google’s algorithms get smarter every day and they’re becoming more capable of determining robust, interesting content from thin garbage that doesn’t actually say anything valuable. A strategy for deciding if your content is great or not is to ask yourself, “Is my reader better off having read my content?” If they are more educated, smarter, happier, or somehow moved emotionally, you did something right.

III.

Make it shareable. Social media signals are the backlinks of the future (now maybe?) Get those share buttons in place so that if someone wants to give you that all important social media vote, all they have to do is click a button. Include the big ones like Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. But you can also include StumbleUpon and Pinterest too. WordPress has great plugins for this and another good resource is ShareThis.com.

Next:

Include an image in the blog post. Not only is it more pleasing visually, it also renders better on social media. As users scroll through their Facebook of G+ feed, a post with an image, especially one with a clever pic that is relevant to the article, is more likely to catch user’s eyes. By the way, don’t borrow or steal images from Google image search. You may not have permission to use those photos and could actually get into some trouble. Make sure to get your stock photos from a reputable online resource. I used dreamstime.com for this blog article and several others here on “Let’s Translate.”

Lastly:

Once you publish your content, post a link to it on Google+ IMMEDIATELY. This will signal Google to crawl and index your content. This will also show Google that you’re the originator of the content so that if anyone else ever duplicates your content on their site, your site won’t be penalized for that. Oh, and make sure you get your Google authorship in order.

Now get to blogging. Have some fun and create something great. Then email me a link so I can share it as a great example!

Thanks for reading.

David McBee