Blogging is a popular pursuit. Instead of committing your innermost thoughts to paper and keeping a hidden journal tucked away inside a bedside drawer, you can write those musings online instead. Of course keeping an online blog is not necessarily the best idea if you stand to lose a lot should the wrong person stumble across it, but blogging is a fun way to share your thoughts with the rest of humanity.
Blogging for SEO
As well as writing a blog for cathartic purposes, blogs are also a useful SEO tool. Posting articles to a website blog is a good way of keeping your website content fresh and up to date. You can use a blog to post news and useful information your customers might find useful. Alternatively, you could simply write about anything under the sun in the hope that readers will enjoy your random ramblings and make the transition from blog to online store in one easy click.
Desperately Seeking Inspiration
The problem many writers have is thinking of something to write about. When your page is a blank canvas, it can be really hard to come up with a fresh and interesting topic. So what on earth do you write about? Well this depends on the type of blog you are writing. Standalone blogs can cope with any subject matter, unless you are sticking to a general theme. Blogs embedded into an existing website should really stick to the subject matter of the rest of the site. This is not to say you have to focus rigidly on writing about light bulbs (if that is what your company sells), but try and write around the general subject area.
Drill Down Into the Subject Area
Let’s say you have a theme of light bulbs. Obviously writing about a specific light bulb is likely to send readers to sleep in their droves, which is not terribly useful. So the trick is to think beyond the lowly light bulb and focus on something related. We buy light bulbs because we need light in our homes, gardens, or office. Therefore writing about lighting in general could work. You could decide to write about garden lighting, and then focus your blog on how to choose solar powered lighting for ponds and water features. I’m sure you get the idea.
Guest Blogging
Making a request to have your articles posted on someone else’s blog is another useful SEO tool. If your article is accepted, you gain back links and (hopefully) fresh visitors to your website. However, writing a guest blog is not as simple as typing out a few hundred words on a subject of your choice. You have to gear the content of your article to the blog you are hoping to guest post on. Whilst some blog owners don’t care about the content of their guest blogs, most do and some have very strict posting criteria for guest bloggers. If in doubt, read the latest posts on the blog you are hoping to post on to see what kind of style and content is appropriate.