Writing blog posts is one of those things that I never thought I’d be doing myself, but here I am, several years later, still writing! There’s a lot that happens in my mind when I’m writing blogs, or as it’s formally been known, “writing content” for a website. While I can’t speak for all writers, I’ll give you the breakdown on why I write, how I write, and hopefully help shed some light on how you can do the same thing.
First things first, blogs are very different than journal writing, or articles for newspapers. Blogs come from a personal perspective, usually written in the same style that the writer talks in real life, and it’s perfectly acceptable to use one sentence and call it a paragraph.
See what I did there? Segue to the meat of the blog! Get on with it, Conor!
1. Nobody Knows Your Business Like You Do
It’s true! As much as I would love to know just how important it is to pick the right solar power panels and which one is best, monocrystalline, polycrystalline or thin film solar panel types, the chances that I can articulate the information into something someone else can understand are pretty slim.
Did you know that the official name of a solar power system is a photovoltaic system? Me neither! And that leads us into the next rule on a blog…
2. Dumb It Down – We’re Not All As Smart As You
Sure you know the difference between a photovoltaic solar panel that generates electricity versus a thermal collector, but the rest of us just think it’s like a mirror thingy that we put on the roof of a house! So, let’s remove all the technical mumbo-jumbo and talk to me like I’m an 8th grader.
I’m not saying that the general population on the internet are not smart, but let’s be honest, we’re in the world of marketing, and the job of marketing is to reach the widest audience. There are definitely times where throwing around the Crystalline Silicon (c-Si) and Photovoltaic (PV) terms are needed, but the general population doesn’t understand them nor do they need to.
3. Save Some Green (money)
Since I’ve touched on the solar power systems, I may as well keep that trend going. Let’s go green and not only make some money, but save some money too. Content writers can be expensive! If you look around the web you’ll see that they range in price from $7 to $150 depending on the article – that’s a HUGE price difference.
Generally, if you pay the $7 you’re going to get $7 worth of writing – and if you thought it was hard dumbing down the article for an 8th grader, imaging all the work you’ll need to do in order to increase the grade level from 2nd to 8th if you outsource to a hack writer.
We perform content writing for a number of our clients, once we’ve done a full discovery of their business and target market, but I can tell you one thing for sure – the articles are not $7, nor are they $150 each. For us, we package our articles as part of our SEO Pricing – after all, much of the power of SEO is in the writing of content on websites.
4. You’ve Got Time – You Can Do It Yourself!
Don’t you love running your own company? Entrepreneurs are the envy of their friends as we get to make our own hours, get out of bed when we want, and don’t have a boss to answer to! Oh, how little they know!
And while many times it can feel like there’s not enough time in the day, if you can carve out 15 minutes to jot down some ideas, you can have an article written in no time. That being said, writing one article, or even two in a month is possible, but Google wants to see fresh content every week or even daily in some cases. It’s rare that you have that much time on your hands, so that’s where a content writing team can come in handy.
5. It’s Fun, At Least That’s What I’m Told To Say!
I remember my high school and college days, and I remember just how much fun I’d have writing essays and papers. That wasn’t you? Yeah, that wasn’t me either! I hated writing, but here I am 20 years later and I’m writing this article.
There are about a hundred other things that I’d like to be doing, but content is critical to a website, and as such, I write. Sometimes I’m writing for just a few minutes in a day, other times I’m writing for the entire day, but at the end of it, there’s a sense of accomplishment when I click “post” and the article goes online.
I don’t see myself being a published writer any time soon, but at least with the blogs I can keep things fresh, and write just like I talk. While I do have to spell and grammar check, writing blog content offers a lot of forgiveness from readers, so not everything has to be reviewed by an English Major before going online (on a side note, two of our content writers *do* have degrees in technical writing and English writing – they love it when I poke fun at them too!).
6. You’ll Learn Something
If nothing else, you’re going to learn something, or at least teach someone about your profession. If you’re not teaching and you’re not learning, then you need to not post the blog article you’re writing and start over instead.
Google’s primary mission is searching content and providing answers to people. So write about things that people want to know about. Jot down your top 10 questions that people ask you on a regular basis and tackle each one in its own blog article. Chances are, you’ll learn something too! At least, you now know there’s at least 3 different types of solar power cell systems out there!
7. Everybody Is Doing It – Even Your Competition
This is probably the biggest motivator that we come across when people ask us to perform content writing for them. They don’t have time to do the writing, but they know they need to have writing done as their competition is doing it.
In business, if you’re not growing, you’ll be left behind. Google sees your website the same way. If you don’t have new, fresh, quality content coming up on your website on a regular basis, they’ll eventually delist you, or at the very least, you’ll be listed on page 5 or 10 (only 2% of searchers ever make it to page number 2, let alone to page 5!).
Final Thoughts
One of the great advantages of the web is that all sizes of businesses can compete against each other on a somewhat level playing field. A small business can often outrank large corporations because of the niche they’re targeting. The solar power company doesn’t necessarily have to compete with everyone in the world/internet–for the most part they’re just targeting a specific segment or location. If they’re located in Omaha, Nebraska like we are, there’s an even smaller niche market. Drilling down content for specific areas is something that the big guys can rarely ever accomplish correctly.
So get writing – once you start writing, you’ll be amazed at how easily it flows. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it does have to make sense. If you’re just writing for search engines, you’re doing it wrong. Your target market should be your audience first; the search engines will find you on their own!
If you need some help meeting the demands of article writing, or you just need to have a few blog postings in your back pocket for those days that you can’t write them, our team at Big Red SEO is ready to help. Contact us today and see how we can help you get the traffic you deserve.