Imagine you could only choose one content marketing strategy. Which one would it be? Social media? Email marketing?
If one strategy was actually PROVEN to radically increase your chances of enjoying a great ROI, with say, a 450% increase in your leads, – wouldn’t that be your first choice?
Well, it turns out that you do have that choice. And It’s called high-frequency, high-value business blogging.
In fact, there’s never been a better time for you to start crafting and posting ridiculously good blog content than right now! Why?
Part of the reason is that there are now powerful free tools (I share the top 4 in this post) that will make your online research super-fast and easy. And yes, it’s also because recent studies have shown that:
Digital marketers who’ve put frequent blogging on their top priority shortlists are 1300% more likely to reap the benefits of positive ROI! (1a)
But why is posting so often, so important?
Well, it’s because companies who published sixteen or more blog posts per month enjoyed approximately 450% more business leads over those who published the usual 0-4 posts per month! (1b)
And if you’re also doing email marketing check this out!:
Business who combine blogging and email marketing have been shown to get 200% more traffic compared to those who don’t! (3)
There’s a simple explanation for this. When you constantly update your blog with fresh content, you can then share that content with your email list for a burst of targeted traffic.
So, How many words do the most effective business blogs have?
The typical word length of posts found in the average highly coveted Google page 1 search results is around 1890 words (4).
And many of the world’s leading content marketers are now reporting that their top performing blog posts range in lengths of between 1500-3000 words! (5)
So what’s your most important lesson here? It’s time for you to start posting high-quality long-form content as often as you can.
Why pay someone else to write your posts when each high quality, well-researched 2000-3000 word article can cost you on average $150-$300+ dollars?
In this post, I’m going to show you the most valuable tips, tools, and tactics for more quickly writing your own high-quality, how-to and list-style long-form business blog posts!
So, what’s arguably the number one tip for becoming a really good fitness-marketing or life coach business blogger? Simple! Star by:
- Become a Really Good Touch Typist
Ok. so you have cutting edge fitness training or life coaching credentials, or rank high on Google. That means you’ve got a wealth of high-value expert knowledge and some really inspiring personal and client success stories to share with your ideal customers right?
And effectively sharing that life-changing knowledge and those inspiring success stories are exactly what you want to do as a blogger.
In fact, effectively communicating those powerful tips and stories, is what’s going to rocket fuel your readers’ trust levels and follow through with your irresistible calls to action (more on this later).
Can you imagine being able to type your best tips and success stories as quickly and clearly as you can think or talk?
At 100 words a minute you could actually write the first draft of your next long-form blog post in as little as 30 minutes!
Touch typing is arguably the single most valuable digital marketing skill you can develop. It’s also one of those super-skills that will add serious value to so many other areas of your life as well!
That said, by making time to practice for as little as 15-60 minutes per day, you can build your typing skills in as little as 1-3 months! Check out these:
2 powerful apps you can use that will super-accelerate your touch typing effectiveness! (6)
Let’s start with this amazing, free, and easy to use touch-typing tutorial app:
It’s called Keybr and you can start using it right now to quickly build your typing speed.
Yes, typing can be frustrating to learn at first. But don’t let that stop you. It’s like learning to ride a bike. Through regular practice, it’ll quickly become an automatic behavior that you’ll benefit from as much as you don’t even have to think about it while you’re doing it!
I strongly recommend that you:
- Add the Keybr app to the top of your browser bookmark list or pin it to your taskbar for easy access. Then:
- Create a daily 15-60 minute practice slot on your calendar or agenda and stick to it.
Second, Here’s an equally powerful online “Pomodoro Timer” app you can use to radically accelerate your touch typing learning effectiveness:
It’s called: “The Tomato Timer” and it’s an exceptional learning and productivity tool you can use to increase your focus, learning speed and work-output on just about any kind of task.
The app works through alternating your most important learning or work tasks with rewarding short breaks.
I strongly recommend that you:
- Add the Tomato Timer app to the top of your browser bookmark list or pin it to your taskbar (right beside, or after the touch-typing tutorial app) and then always:
- Run the tomato timer when you’re doing your daily touch typing practice.
- You can also use this app to increase your productivity on many other work and learning tasks.
When you use the tomato timer it’s a good idea to:
- Free your immediate environment of any distractions (i.e. do single tasking)
- Make a top 5 list of highly rewarding and enjoyable activities you can do during your short breaks
- Make sure to start one of these highly enjoyable activities within just a few seconds after you finish your 25 minutes of touch-typing practice.
This will increase the brain-building “positive reinforcement effect” of your reward-break. It will both accelerate your learning curve and help you build and maintain a strong touch-typing practice habit, – until of course, you master it!
- Bonus Tip #1: If you don’t have time to do the full 60 minutes practice sessions: do 10-minute practice session by using the “long break button” instead of the 25 minute Pomodoro button; followed by the rewarding/relaxing break sessions using the 5-minute break button. Make sure the sound is turned on so you hear when the timer goes off and quickly transition between your practice and reward times.
Substituting the “10-minute break button” for the 25 minute Pomodoro button (i.e. shorting your work task time) is also recommended if you’re really having trouble staying focused during your first few practice sessions. But make sure to jump to the 25 minute timer as soon as you’re comfort level increases with your typing practice.
- Bonus Tip #2: Also, use the tomato timer the way I’ve suggested here the next time you start blogging or any other MIT (Most Important Task) you set for yourself!
Let’s say that you’ve devoted a solid 1-3 months or more to becoming a great typist (or maybe it’s a skill you’ve already developed).
You’re now ready to apply your growing new typing abilities to start quickly crafting deep-engagement long form blog posts. But where exactly do you start?
Start by doing great online research:
The first thing you want to do when creating any new blog post is online research to find out if the topic you’re considering is a good one or not.
Doing great research will also help you to:
- Find high-value keywords to work with
- Discover new, hot topics that really spark your interest and motivation to write
- Get high-value research, stats and inspirational quotes to share throughout your posts (a business blogging best practice), and to:
- Generate great blog post title ideas.
One of the top business blogging best-practices right now is using a content marketing approach to create your content, – also known as 10X content creation. (7)
For example, from an organic SEO perspective: the kind of blog posts that are getting the most traffic and engagement right now are “how-to” and list (i.e. top 10) posts.
One of the most effective ways for you to create these kinds of posts is to combine and write about the best parts (the cream of the cream) of each of the top blog posts you find.
For example, you can take the #1 tip from each of the top 10 blog posts you find in your topic area and make a super-top-10-list of your own. You then arrange this super-tips in a logical sequence (with the best ones first) and summarize them in your own highly readable prose.
And how you arrange your post is not just about the chronological order as much as the direct relevance each tip or point contributes to the unique contribution you’re creating for your blog. It’s also about the inspiration level a given point contributes to the overall feel and flow of your post.
Bonus Tip #1: Interlinking your content with other relevant posts on your blog, along with a few links to high authority external sites, relevant to your content, is another business blogging best practice.
Bonus Tip #2: It’s also a great idea to integrate your own high-value tips and insights when every you see room for improvement.
Always keep an eye out for creative ways to integrate those great personal and customer success stories we talked about earlier.
Bonus Tip #3: Add 1 high-quality image or every 100 words or so (you guessed it! another business blogging best practice). Or at the very least add 1 great image for every section. And don’t forget to add your most important keywords as tags in your images descriptions for powerful SEO boost!
Not only does telling your story through pictures plus words increase your reader engagement, but it can also double the number of social media shares you get! (7).
Also, having lots of great images in your blog posts means you can easily copy and paste them to use when creating social media posts for yet another proven boost in engagement and click-through.
(7) http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-traffic-with-these-5-awesome-image-stats/
You can then plug all that engagement, inspiration, and trust you’ve generated directly into your irresistible call to action. More on this later. But first:
Here are four powerful tools that many of the world’s top business bloggers are using right now to simplify and streamline their online research:
- Google Trends is a powerful and free online research tool that lets you type in your keywords and see what the trend volume is for the words across Google. You can explore trend levels from the past hour, four hours, 24 hours or the last week, – right back to 2004 to the present or even a customer range search if you want. It’s really cool tool you have to check out!
You can also search for trends in specific geographic areas, and you get a list of often thought provoking related trends.
- Buzzsumo is an amazing tool for finding the freshest online content ranked based on which posts are enjoying the highest social sharing levels. It has both free and paid versions, and both are amazing. This is probably the main tool that’s used the most by leading bloggers and content marketers.
- Twitter Like most social media platforms, Twitter is basically designed to work as an internet search engine. But the great thing about Twitter is that it’s also designed to maximize real-time content sharing and engagement.
So when you type your keywords into the Twitter search bar, you’re actually generating a top list of what’s being shared the most in real time for those keywords. Using Twitter to conduct your online research lets you see what the top influencers and talking about and posting to their blogs.
- https://ubersuggest.io/ Once you’ve developed a strong topic and curated content for your next post, it’s a good idea to do some basic keyword research.
Ubersuggest is a great free tool for getting a general idea of the search volume for the keywords you’re working with. But by far its best feature is that it actually generates a list of high-value, suggested keywords and phrases that you might not have thought about.
Great blogging needs great structure:
Once you’ve done your research the next most critical strategy for maximizing your blogging effectiveness is to create a basic structure to guide what you’re going to write about and how you’re going to write about it.
Structuring your writing around a solid outline will help you stay focused. It will also result in a much easier to read the final product.
Here’s a great, generic blog outline you can use to quickly craft “10X” blog posts:
- Opening lines short Paragraph(s) or sentences that briefly introduce your topic in a way that communicates the real world value and/and or inspiration your post will deliver.
The quality and simplicity of your opening lines are critical. Most readers will quickly scan these and decide in just seconds if they’re going to stay and read or bounce over to your competition.
If you’re integrating a success story, this is where to offer the first few lines of your story. You can then clearly define the value your blog is going to create for the reader or the pain point it’s going to solve for them.
- Your Blog Sub-Sections i.e.:
– Section 1
– Sections 2
– Section 3 etc.:
In a top 10 tips post, for example, you’ll have 10 sections with subtitles for each section. This is where you can arrange and summarize the “10X” or cream-of-the-cream content you’ve curated through your online research.
Each subsection needs to have a catchy engaging title in its own right. When it comes to 10X blog writing each section can be an improved variation of the title from the top of the top content you’re basing your article about.
Remember, the top performing online content is written in short easy to read sentences and even shorter paragraphs. Use bullet points to enable “frictionless” skimming.
Bonus Tip #1: The top digital marketing bloggers recommend writing content at around a “grade 7 reading level” and to write in the second person voice whenever possible (i.e. you, and you’re instead of me and mine or he and her).
Writing at a grade 7 reading level makes reading easy and decreases site visitor bounce rate. That means getting rid of jargon and minimizing the use of adverbs.
If you don’t want to spend several hours learning how to write at a 7th-grade level or minimize adverbs etc., I strongly recommend you do the following:
Once you’ve written your first draft or blog section, copy and paste it into the free version of the Hemmingway app and make the recommended edits. This is probably one of the single most powerful blogging writing tools at your disposal right now and will train you to write easy to read frictionless prose.
If you’re going to make one investment in a general editing tool, I strongly, strongly recommend you use Grammarly.com. Not only will it help you improve spelling, grammar and help you build the kind of informal, conversational writing style you need, but it also has a powerful plagiarism checker, so you don’t fall into the accidental duplicate content trap! It’s not expensive and will save you a ton of money by not having to hire an online editor.
- Your Conclusion: This is the place where you give a brief summary of your top 2 or 3 most high-value, and/or most emotionally salient points that were covered in your post.
If you’re integrating a success story, it’s a good idea to add a few sentences that add closure and strong emotional peak to your story.
Finally, plug all the interest, motivation, trust and attention you’ve inspired in your reader directly into your:
- Irresistible Call to Action: Having people follow through with your call to action is the core business development goal of your blog.
Highly effective calls to action use strong action verbs like “Join” or “Visit” and words that direct immediate follow through like “Right Now.”
But just as important, irresistible calls to action also clearly state the value your reader will enjoy as a direct result of their following through on it.
You also want to be fun and creative whenever possible. And if you have strong pieces of social proof to add, – even better! Here’s an example:
Want free business development coaching from Industry Leader: Dr. John Spencer Ellis? Coaching and mentoring, that if you follow through on will actually grow your business?
John’s been Featured on Oprah and Jillian Michaels, of the wildly popular TV show “The Biggest Loser” calls John: “My Uber-Mentor!”
Join John’s exclusive, private Facebook Group right now and you’ll be joining the “I’m-actually-getting-more-paying-clients-for-my-coaching-or-fitness-business”club!
What makes this call to action irresistible?
Well for one thing, you’ve just finished reading this new how to business blogging guide. You now have a concrete strategy and some of the most powerful online tools at your disposal to:
- Become a fast and effective touch typist, and
- Online researcher and:
- A 10X business blog writer!
- You’ve also seen a snippet of social proof from just some of the many industry giants who have worked with or featured me on their shows, projects or publications.
Can you imagine what kind of tips, tactics and tools I’ll share with you as we interact in my small, private Facebook group? Can you imagine being able to ask me, and get answers to your most important and immediate questions about building your business and your brand? This may actually, be the most important call to action you follow through on in your life!
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Sources for this post:
(1a + 1b): http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/business-blogging-in-2015#sm.0000x4b40venxd1vzqr1qb07bcpgr
(2): http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics
(3): http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31617/Businesses-That-Blog-Generate-2X-More-Email-Traffic-New-Data.aspx#sm.000l0buka1a8vfe3xe8109w4ci326
(4&5): https://www.lean-labs.com/blog/the-ideal-length-for-business-blog-posts-when-less-is-more
(6):http://neilpatel.com/2016/03/23/5-lessons-on-being-a-more-productive-writer-plus-tips-you-can-steal/
(7):https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday
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