Is writing blogs feeling like a chore? This simple blog formula will have you writing your blogs in under 15 minutes.
Got stuck blogging? Use this easy blog formula
There are four key reasons why blogging is important for business. The first is that it demonstrates your business’ knowledge, philosophy and voice – enabling potential customers to see what you have to offer. In a similar manner, it enables you to share with existing customers and your broader community insights that you believe they will find useful. Thirdly, it enables you to regularly update content on your website, which is great for search engine optimisation (SEO) and getting found on Google. And fourthly, sharing your blogs more widely, on social media and other websites, then helps build community as well as provide links back to your website, again improving your website’s SEO.
One of the questions we get asked is ‘what does a good blog look like?’ The best blogs are on a single topic, are around 300 to 500 words, and provide a useful insight or tool that the reader can use immediately. Your customers will soon tire of the purely ‘sales’ blog, that presents a problem, asks lots of questions, but doesn’t actually provide a solution except to ‘buy this now’.
The other criteria of a good blog is that it answers all the questions: ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘how’, and ‘what if’. The reason questions to these answers are important is that different people place a different level of importance on each of these questions. So, if you don’t provide some answer to all of them, then there will be a percentage of your target audience that just won’t appreciate your blog.
And great way to answer these questions is using our Simple Blog Formula. We’ve provided this tool to hundreds of customers, and found that once they’ve used it a few times, the actual writing of the blog becomes the easy part!
The formula starts with the blog title, which has the key words your customers use. The first paragraph then answers the questions ‘why is this [blog title] important?’ In this article, we answered the question ‘why blog?’ For a 500 word blog, this paragraph should be no more than three to five sentences.
The next paragraph answers the question ‘what is [blog topic] about?’ So, in this article, we talked about ‘what does a good blog look like’. Answering the ‘what’ in a 500 word blog can be as short as one to three sentences.
The next section of your blog is the ‘how’ to do [blog title]. This is the section of the article we’re in the middle of! Answering the how should be the largest portion of the blog – aim for a minimum of 50% of the total words. Your ‘how’ could be a series of paragraphs, dot points, diagrams or flowcharts. This is where you can get creative.
Finally, you should finish your blog with a paragraph on ‘what if’, or ‘what next’ around your blog title. An example of a ‘what if’ in this article might be ‘what if I don’t know what to write about?’ An example of a ‘what next’ might be to encourage readers to download the Simple Blog Template and get blogging! This paragraph is a similar length as the ‘why’ paragraph.
So, if you’re not sure what to write about, think about the problems it makes sense for you to help your customers solve. Come up with three to six broad themes and use Google Adwords to find the key words people use to find solutions to those problems (and then use those key words in your blog as well!). Three to six themes enables you to blog on each theme at least twice a year, using a ‘theme per month’ plan. Download our Simple Blog Template to help get you started writing!