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Earn more enquiries, leads and sales with your blog

Louise Mansergh

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Contents

4 Why should I have a blog? 34 Sharing and promoting your content

15 What else do you need to consider before you install your blog?

41 Promoting your blog - repurposing

19 Having a sign up box 52 Guest blogging

26 Now you have a blog, what should you write?

65 Top tips for having a successful blog

32 Blogging ideas cheat sheet

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Thank you

• Before we get started, I wanted to say a very big THANK YOU for downloading this Blogging module.

• There’s lots of information in here about setting up, writing and promoting your blog.

• Read, and work, through it in stages.

• Don’t think you need to do everything all at once. You don’t! Start off bit by bit.

• If you have any questions when you get to the end, just drop me a line via Facebook, Twitter or my website. Details are at the end!

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Why should I have a blog?

• You probably know you should have a blog on your website, but why? What are the benefits?

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Why should I have a blog?

1. It builds a relationship with your potential customers

2. Helps keep people coming back to your website to see what you’re saying

3. Positions you as an expert in your field

4. Can be repurposed for other marketing, especially emails, social media and other blog sites like Medium or Slideshare

5. Can open you to a new audience who find you through Google

6. Google likes websites that are regularly updated, and having a blog is one of the easiest ways to do that

7. Blog posts can be used in social media adverts to attract a new audience, and help build your email list

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What is a blog?

• A blog is a part of your website you regularly update with news and views about your business.

• The best blogs are ones that give value to the reader to help them solve a problem, and are updated regularly.

• A blog can be written, video or audio.

• And by regularly I mean at least once a week.

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How to set up a blog

• If you don’t have a blog section on your website, speak to the person or company that created your site, and say you want to add a blog section.

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How to set up a blog

• There are thousands of blog page templates that can be added to websites very easily, especially if your site uses Wordpress.

• It’s worth using a blog template, rather than just a normal page, as you’ll have the ability to have comments, social share buttons, and categories, all of which are fundamental parts of having a blog.

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How to set up a blog

• Take a look around at blogs you read, blogs your competitors are doing, and blogs from websites you enjoy.

• Make a note of what you like best about them.

• It could be the layout, colours, style, etc and put this in your brief to your website person.

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How to set up a blog

• Ask your website person to give you at least three options of the style of blog you could have and choose one of those.

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Blog examples

• Here are a few examples of how you can set out your blog:

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Blog examples

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Blog examples

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Blog examples

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What else do you need to consider before you install your blog?

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What else do you need to consider before you install your blog?

• Make sure it reflects your style and brand.

• It should match the rest of your website and any offline marketing (brochures etc) you have.

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What else do you need to consider before you install your blog?

• Are there social share buttons on the page?

• Make it easy for your readers to share your content online by having social share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.

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What else do you need to consider before you install your blog?

• Is there an area you can put a sign up box?

• THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT!

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Having a sign up box

• The main aim of your blog is to drive traffic to your website, and THEN get people to sign up to your email list.

• Everything you do online should help you build your email list and leads for your business.

• Blogging is a crucial part of that, and to support that you need to have a sign up box somwhere on each blog post.

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What’s a sign up box?

• A sign up box is where you ask someone for their name and email address in exchange for something – called a freebie. Your freebie can be:– A check list

– Sign up for our newsletter

– How to guide

– A discount

– Something that’s related to your blog post and allows your readers to take the next step

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What’s a sign up box?

• The sign up box can be on the right, at the bottom or pop up after a certain amount of time someone has been on your website.

• There are many ways of manipulating a sign up box and you’ll want to try some testing to see what works best for you.

• There are also many companies that provide sign up boxes that can appear in various ways on your website. Your website person will be able to recommend the best one for your site.

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This is a sign up box – pop up

• This is pop up that appears on a website after a certain amount of time (eg 10 seconds)

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Sign up box – right hand side• You can encourage people to sign up to your mailing list by

offering something aligned to your business. Here it’s recipes.

Sign up box!

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Sign up box – right hand side

• Here this Chiropractic clinic is offering a free spine check

Sign up box!

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

• Firstly you want to think about what your customers need to hear from you. Ask yourself:– What questions do my customers ask me?

– What information can I share that will really help them?

– What problems am I solving for my customers?

– Are there any themes with how I help my customers?

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

• Then think about the words your customers use to describe why they come to you.

• These are your keywords

• Eg if you’re a nutritionist your keywords will include – Healthy diet, healthy eating, low GI, healthy recipes, family

friendly food, menu planner, weight loss, emotional eating, etc

• Now you have a few keywords, go to google, search for one of your keywords and at the bottom of the page you’ll see what other topics come from these keywords

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

• Eg. When I searched “healthy eating” these topics came up. This is what people are searching for online, and what you can write about on your blog

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

• You’ll see there’s a theme here!!

• Your blog needs to be all about helping your ideal customer.

• Not about what you’re trying to sell (although that will come into it, just by default of showcasing your expertise.)

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Now you have a blog, what should you write?

• If you’re just starting a blog you should be able to come up with 20 subjects pretty easily.

• Just sit down and take 15 minutes to write a list of blog posts that could help your customers.

• That’s almost half a year’s content right there if you do one post a week!

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Blogging ideas cheat sheet

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Blogging cheatsheet

• If your blog is more established, or you’re really struggling to find topics, take a look at my cheatsheet “The 25 best places to find inspiration for your blog posts.”

• There are 25 places to find ideas for your blog so there should be plenty of inspiration on what to write for your audience.

• You can find the cheatsheet here

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Sharing and promoting your content

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Sharing your content

• You’ve written your blog, you’ve posted it on your website, and now traffic is going to start pouring into your site, and your email list is going to explode.

• Right? Right?!?!

• Well, it’s possible, but a bit implausible.

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Sharing your content

• You see, writing a blog is only half the work.

• You could wait for Google to index it and start sending traffic your way, which will work over time, but if you want to give your blog and website a kick up the bum, then you need to help bring traffic to your site too.

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Sharing is caring

• Every time you write a post you need to think “that’s half the work done.”

• This is because you need to spend the other half of your time promoting it.

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How do I promote my blog?

• If you’re asking yourself this question, fear not my friend, I am here to help.

• After you’ve published your blog on your website there are a number of ways you can promote it:

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Promoting your blog – social media

• Link to it in social media

• Whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. To get the most from it you should also upload a bespoke image for each social media platform, as their images are all slightly different sizes. You can do this fairly easily with Adobe Spark.

• If you want to drive even more traffic you can pay for Facebook advertising and Twitter advertising to drive traffic to your blog post.

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Promoting your blog - Email

• Send it to your email list

• Use your blog posts to form part of your weekly email to your list.

• You’ll want to have something different to say each week, and using your blogs is a great way to do this, and helps to provide automatic content for your email.

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Promoting your blog - repurposing

• Repurposing means adapting your content for a different purpose.

• So once you’ve promoted it on your social media sites and to your email list, it’s now time to look at how you can edit, tweak, cut up and repackage your blog post to drive more traffic to your website.

• Here are some ideas on how you can repurpose your content:

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Repurposing your blog - Medium

• Medium is a blogging website that anyone can upload their blog to.

• They sort through the best ones and promote those on the home page.

• Don’t just republish your blog post here verbatim, edit it and tweak it slightly so it’s different.

• Google HATES seeing duplicate content republished across the internet.

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Repurposing your blog - LinkedIn

• LinkedIn is the professional social network, and what better way to promote your professional expertise than on here?

• You can publish long form blog posts on LinkedIn under their publishing platform.

• When you go to your home page on LinkedIn you’ll see a box at the top in the middle with the option to “Write an article”.

• Click here and you’ll be taken to a separate page where you can upload your content. You can also add images, slides, tweets and a header image.

• You’ll want to tweak the article as Google hates seeing the exact same content in more than one place on the internet.

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Repurposing your blog - YouTube

• Turn it into a video and upload it to YouTube

• Take the salient points from your blog post, spend a few minutes preparing what you’ll say and take a video summarising the key points and upload it to your business’s YouTube page.

• YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, after Google, so it’s worth using this.

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Repurposing your blog - YouTube

• I know appearing on camera is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the more you do it, the easier it gets.

• Spend an evening practising and watching yourself back, and you’ll soon see where you can improve.

• Make sure you cut out the umms and ahhs, look at the camera (don’t look to the side), don’t read from a script (no matter how tempting this is) and try and enjoy it.

• You don’t need a professional camera either, just your phone on a basic tripod, so it stays steady, is enough.

• Getting it done is waaaay better than wasting time trying to get it perfect!

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Repurposing your blog - YouTube

• If you really, really, really can’t face going on camera at the moment, then to get yourself started, try using the video option in Adobe Spark where you can make a text video and upload this instead.

• I’m ONLY suggesting you do this in the short term to get you up and running.

• People buy from people, not from text videos, so the sooner you can get yourself on camera, the better.

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Repurposing your blog – Live video

• If you’re feeling confident with video you can spend a few minutes discussing the key points in your post on a Facebook live or Periscope

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Repurposing your blog - Podcast

• If video is just too much right now, then record yourself reading the blog post, and upload it as a podcast to your website.

• You can also add it as an audio file in your emails, although be clear it’s the same content as your blog so your readers don’t feel they’re being ripped off.

• You can also upload your podcast to:– Stitcher– Itunes

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Repurposing your blog - SlideShare

• SlideShare is a website where people upload slide decks on particular topics. The best ones are highly visual are are around 12 slides long.

• Take the main points from your article and turn them into a powerpoint presentation that can be uploaded to SlideShare.

• If you’re not a designer, I’d strongly recommend using a designer to create your slide deck for this, as you’re more likely to get positive feedback if you combine good content (which you’ll do naturally, of course!) with a strong design.

• If you’re not a designer, DO NOT be tempted to design it yourself. You’ll waste time and it’ll most likely look mediocre at best! (No-one will look at it if it looks rubbish)

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Repurposing your blog - Infographic

• If you can turn your post into an infographic you can post this on social media, which is also a great way to encourage your blog post to be shared.

• You can ask a designer to do this for you, or you can try it yourself. There are several websites that provide templates for infographics:– Canva– Piktochart– Visme

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ACTION STEP

• For your next blog post pick two of these tactics to use. After a few weeks check your google analytics and see how many extra visits they brought to your website.

• Test something different with each blog post and after a while you’ll see what’s working best with your audience, and generating the most traffic for you.

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Guest blogging

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Benefits of guest blogging

• Positions you as an expert with a new audience• Helps build relationships with other websites in

your sector• Good for SEO as you can link back to your own

website in your biography at the end• As well as traffic on their site these websites will

use email marketing and your blog post could be used in their emails

• Most importantly, it’s an opportunity for you to build your email list

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Guest blogging

• Once you’ve had your blog up and running AND you’ve been posting consistently to it for at least six months I would recommend starting to contact other blog sites to see if you can contribute to them.

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Benefits of guest blogging

• The point of guest blogging on other websites is to spread your message to an audience who aren’t familiar with you and don’t know who you are.

• This is a great way to get some leads, new traffic to your site, and hopefully some new sign ups to your email list.

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When looking for other websites to guest blog on you’ll want to consider:

• Is this in my area of expertise?

• Who are they writing for? Is it a similar audience to mine?

• What is the overall look and feel of the site? Does it feel reputable? (You can check the authority of the website by using a free tool like the SEO Moz toolbar)

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Tracking results from guest blogs

• Think about how you’re going to track your results from guest blogging. What does a successful guest blog look like to you? Is it…– An increase in visitors to your site?

– A specific number of sign ups to your email list?

– Comments on the guest post?

– Social shares?

• All of the above?!

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Where to find guest blog opportunities

• I’m going to state the obvious here and suggest you go to Google as your first stop. Think of 8-10 topics you usually write about and use these to search “topic guest blog” or “topic guest post”.

• You can search in Twitter too.

• Once you’ve found a few sites you think would be good to post to it’s time to put together your pitch.

• There’s also an amazing list here of websites that accept guest posts: https://www.prepostseo.com/guest-posting-sites

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Pitching for guest bloggingopportunities

• Check their guidelines.

– Many sites that accept guest posts will have guidelines on what they are and are not looking for. Read these before you send anything over.

• Check how they like to be pitched to.

– Some websites want a full article, some will happy to receive some ideas on potential blog posts, some will want to check your own blog first before proceeding.

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Pitching for guest blogging opportunities

• Send each site an individual email or form (depending on how they want to be pitched to).

• I know it’s tempting to copy and paste something saying “I was looking at your website and I feel we’re a good fit blah blah” but the websites you’ve found will likely receive umpteen pitches a day for guest blogs, and you want yours to stand out.

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Pitching for guest blogging opportunities

• In your pitch you should:

– Say why you can help their audience

– Show you’ve read their blogs and know how to write in their style

– Say why you’re a good fit for them

– Showcase your personality

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Once your guest blog has been accepted

• You’ll almost always have a section at the end to give a brief biography about yourself.

• Give a couple of sentences about you and your background and then include a link to a page on your website where people can download one of your freebies, and be added to your email list.

• You want to include a specific call to action you want this new audience to take.

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Your guest blog biography

• For example you might write: Louise Mansergh is an expert marketing consultant who helps small businesses grow with on and offline marketing. You can download her free checklist on the Top 10 questions to ask when you hear about a great last minute advertising deal so you don’t get sucked into deals that seem too good to be true.

• The link should then take people to a landing page where they can download the checklist.

• Do not just send people to your homepage, as most people will only visit your site once, and you won’t get nearly as many sign ups.

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After your guest blog is published

• Once your post has been published, promote it on your social media sites and in your email. You could even pay for some advertising for this.

• Show the love to your new guest blog and their website. The website owners will appreciate this.

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Top tips for having a successful blog

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Top tips – Blog titles

• You want your titles to be attention grabbing and entice people to click on it. Some classic examples are:– Before you do XXX do XXXX

– How to XXXX in XX days

• You NEED a compelling title in order for people to read your blog.

• Take a look at websites and blogs you like to read. What headings are they using that grab your attention?

• Also, ask your customers what they’d like to read

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Top tips – A blog doesn’t have to be written

• If you’re not a fan of writing, or feel it takes too long, then your blog can be podcast or a video

• Plenty of people online record a weekly video or audio for their audience

• But you do need to produce some form of content (whether it’s written/audio/video) at least once a week.

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Top tips - Blog layout

• Familiar with TL;DR? (Too long; didn’t read)

• Don’t fall into this trap with your blog posts. How we read a website is different from how we read a book.

• Split your content up by headings, bullet points and imagery.

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Top tips – Call to action

• Some of your blog posts may just be for information, but where possible, put a call to action at the bottom of your post to let your audience know what they should do next.

• It could be:– For more information on XXX, download our helpful

cheatsheet on XXXX– To make an appointment call us on XXX– If you’d like help with XXX, call us for a free 30 minute

consultation on XXXX

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Top tips - Length

• There is no perfect length to blog posts. Sometimes they can be a 300 words, sometimes they can be 2,000 words.

• Go with what fits best with the topic you’re writing about.

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Top tips - Length• Here’s an example of a short blog post from a

nutritionist

http://taramillernutrition.com/uncategorized/what-is-normal-eating/

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Top tips - Length

• And a longer one from the same blog

http://taramillernutrition.com/food-nutrition/what-kind-of-nutritionist-am-i/

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Top tips - Pictures

• Use imagery in your blog posts.

• There are plenty of stock image websites. I use Istockphoto which you need to pay for, but there are free imagery sites too:

– Unsplash

– Death to the stock photo

– Stockpic

– Negative space

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Top tips - Segment your blog posts under different topics

• If you find you’re writing about several different topics, then start categorising your blog posts so people interested in one topic can find everything you’ve written on this easily.

• You can do this by adding tags or categories to your posts.

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Top tips – Be you

• If you’re reading other blog posts it’s easy to start wanting to sound like your favourite bloggers.

• Please don’t! • Your audience needs your unique voice, which

only you can provide, and trying to write like someone else usually means you sound nothing like them, and just come across as a bot!

• Write how you speak.• This can take some practice so don’t worry if it

feels like it takes time to find your voice

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Top tips - comments

• If you enable comments on your blog, then make sure you take the time to respond to people who leave a comment.

• This helps to massively build engagement with your audience.

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Top tips - Be patient

• Remember that a lot of online marketing takes time to see the results and blogging is definitely one of those areas.

• The more you do it, the more you’ll grow your email list and social media following, and the more you’ll start to see an increase in traffic and eventually an increase in revenue.

• It takes persistence, hard work and patience. • Don’t get disheartened by an apparent lack of

immediate results.

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Finally…

• It’s better to start today than to wait until tomorrow

• If time/budget is an issue, just start writing content on your blog, and promote it when you have more time/budget

• The fundamental point of a blog is to showcase your expertise to encourage your website visitors to sign up to your email list/become customers.

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Thank you

• Thank you for downloading this module.• I hope you’ve found it useful, informative and has

encouraged you to start your blog/improve your current blog. Today!

• Let me know how you get on and send me a link to your blog – I’d love to take a look.

• Contact me via:– www.facebook.com/thelouisemansergh– www.twitter.com/louisemansergh– www.louisemansergh.com

Best wishes, Louise