30 Ideas to Help You Become a Blogging Ninja

Why Some People Hate Blogging

If you haven’t heard us talk about the Marketing Wheel of Success, you may not realize how important blogging is to your overall marketing strategy. When I talk to most of my clients, I get sighs and grumbles when I talk about blogging. It requires time, decent writing skills and rigorous editing, not to mention you have to make your content interesting to the people who will read it. Many people who I talk with don’t have a blog and don’t want anything to do with one. If you’re one of my clients, you’re likely doing some work to make your blog a reality, even if it’s just giving insight into what we should be writing for you.

So what is it about blogging that people hate so much? Taking time out of the equation, I can tell you first hand that it’s not easy to come up with interesting ideas that are worthy of a blog post. Even if you come up with an idea, it’s common to find yourself staring at the screen, stuck thinking about what you’re going to write next. The good thing is there are many strategies to help you overcome these challenges so that you can become a blogging ninja who writes great content. Before I dig into those strategies, let’s take a look at why blogging is so important.

Why Blogging is So Important

First and foremost, your website should be at the center of your marketing wheel. You should be driving traffic from all of your communications to your website. After all, it’s the only marketing tool that you pay just a few dollars a month for that gives you unlimited space and time to get your message to your audience. That’s why you should be offering incentives in your print ads to drive traffic to your website; it’s why you should include links to your website on photos you share with Facebook; it’s also the reason why you should include excerpts from your blog posts and links to the entire post in your email newsletters. As a matter of efficiency, however, if all of your messages originate on your blog, then you should never have trouble coming up with content for your social media accounts, your email newsletter or the advertisements that you pay big bucks for.

In addition to being an efficient way to introduce your message to your audience, it’s great for search engine optimization. If you offer weight loss services and you blog often about weight loss, you are more likely to show up in the top of search results when someone searches for weight loss.  The same is true of any topic. Why you want to show up in the top of search engines for any keyword should be evident, but as a rule of thumb, if you blog 20 times per month, you’ll get five times more traffic. More traffic equals more potential customers and the better your blog posts are, the better you’ll be at convincing them to become a customer.

Outside of search engine optimization, if you buy ads on search engine, one of the factors that determine what you pay for clicks is how relevant your website and landing pages are to the search term that caused your ad to appear. The more you blog about relevant topics, the higher your website will rank for those search terms and the less you will end up paying for clicks. We’ve seen the price customers pay for clicks reduced by more than 50% as a result of well-optimized content.

From the social media angle, blogging can be a great way for you to introduce more content to your social networks and get them to click into your website. If you’re a landscape professional and you write a blog post about reducing energy in your home by the strategic planting of tress and shrubs outside your home and share it with your social networks, you may get some people who say, “Wow, I never thought of that before.” If they read your blog post and find it useful, they may share it with a friend via email or with their entire friends list on Facebook. That could mean new customers for your business and all you had to do was write a few hundred words. Not to mention that search engines place a great deal of weight on how often content from your website is shared and re-shared on social networks.

There are many more reasons why blogging can benefit your business and the explanations above just graze the surface. If nothing else, trust when I say that it’s one of the MOST important communications strategies that you will use to promote your business online.

30 Ideas for Becoming a Blogging Ninja

I’ll never claim to have all of the answers and I promise that I had to learn everything I know somewhere, but the Internet is a wonderful place to learn. Here are a few things that may help you reach your own goals of becoming a blogging ninja, even if that means going from writing no blog posts to just blogging once a month. While there are only four items on my list below, dig into the articles and find a total of 30 ideas to become a true ninja.

1. Create a Blog Calendar – Consistency is key when it comes to blogging. If you don’t set out to blog on a regular basis, you’ll blog once and may never blog again. Setting goals and having a calendar is an important first step in making the commitment to blogging. If you’re using WordPress to blog, there is a plugin called Editorial Calendar that turns your blog list into a calendar, making it easy to setup a schedule start draft posts and drag them to specific days on the calendar for editing later. Don’t worry, your posts won’t be seen unless you click on the Publish button, so if you miss your schedule by a day or two, it’s not the end of the world.
2. Find a Content Strategy to Fuel Your Ideas – If coming up with topics and angles is a challenge, HubSpot has a great blog post that explores seven different blogging angles from How-To posts to posts that explore how your company solved a specific problem. Use this to find ideas where you thought you had none and title your draft posts right away.
3. Rewrite Old Content for New Audiences – I read an article a while ago about taking old blog posts and rewriting them for different audiences. I couldn’t remember where I read it, but after some digging, it turns out that HubSpot authored this one too: How to Turn One Idea Into a Bottomless Backlog of Blog Posts. The article explores taking one idea and writing it for different customer segments.  It’s a very effective approach for creating fresh content when you thought there was nothing else to talk about.
4. Come Up With Ideas When You  Have Absolutely No Clue – I’m a shameless StumbleUpon user and one of the topics that I Stumble often is marketing. Using the service, I recently came across a great blog post from CopyBlogger entitled 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue. Once you read this article, you’ll see what strategies I used to write this blog post. In short, being creative is not always easy, but there are many things you can do to spark your creative engine.

Never Give Up

Now you’re ready to write your first blog post or if you’ve already started, you should be ready to get back to it, but no matter what, when it comes to blogging, NEVER GIVE UP! If you set a goal to blog once a week and you miss a week, get back into it like you never skipped a beat. Giving up would be the equivalent to missing a credit card payment and never paying again. One missed post is not the end of the world. If you’re fresh out of ideas, go back through your blog and just pick one to rewrite. If you really can’t change it enough to create a brand new blog post, edit your post and republish it as a new one. Share it all over again like it’s a brand new idea. The point is, you’ve got to stick to it; just like a diet or a work-out plan, the harder you work at it, the better the results will be.

To learn more about blogging and SEO and how Proximo can help, check out our page on Search Engine Optimization. You can also fill out the form below for a free one-on-one consultation.