The Ultimate Blogging Checklist

Want to create captivating content that will have your audience hooked from the get go?

Well, there are some fundamental steps to consider before you begin your blogging journey. We’ve picked the brains of our copywriting team and compiled their top tips for crafting engaging copy to help you get started. 

Plan & Prepare 

It sounds kinda obvious but planning and preparing your blogs is absolutely essential. You need to have a strategy, how many blogs will you be posting and how often? Be kind to yourself, a daily blog is incredibly optimistic if you’ve just started out. Set yourself up for success and think about the amount of time you have to write your blogs – will they slot in around your workload?

Once you’ve set a realistic target, create an ideas document and thrash out some concepts. Your focus should be what will resonate with your audience, what would be of interest or use to them. Perhaps you receive a lot of questions on a certain topic, answer them in a blog – this will improve your website ranking too. By pre-empting these questions and providing insightful answers – search engines will index your blog post as relevant to those search terms. 

Watch Your Tone

When blogging for a business you need to ensure your tone is in line with the brand. If you work or own a business that has a playful and fun image – you can totally convey this in your writing. If it’s more serious and no nonsense, then stick with it. You don’t want to confuse your audience. Take note of household brands, how do they communicate with their audience? M&S and Aldi have different approaches, but both fit their differing target audiences perfectly. 

Solid Structure

When most people sit down to start writing a blog, it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult to type what you planned on writing. Copywriters make it look so easy. There’s a knack to it – structure. 

Before you start typing letters at random and hoping for the best, take a breath, sit back and think about how it should link together. It needs to be cohesive. Plan each section, start with your introduction. This is the initial audience greeting and briefly describes what the blog is about. Next, separate the points you want to make into sections – you can then include some ideas for each one which will help you piece it together. Finally, you need a conclusion – this can be a brief overview of all of your points wrapped up with a call-to-action such as ‘get in touch for more information’. Structuring your blog into bite size pieces gives you steps to work through, which is considerably easier than staring at a blank page and panicking. 

Media – Images, Videos, Gifs, Oh My!

Media is a brilliant tool for engaging your audience further. Plus, it will improve your page score as it will increase the amount of time the user is on the page. Make sure you use high-quality media, fuzzy images and clunky videos won’t cut the mustard. It’s a clever way of showcasing new products/ services or including testimonials – you can promote your business through your blog. That’s kinda the point. 

Internal Links & Backlinks

Once you’re happy with your blog, our copywriters recommend including some internal links to other relevant pages on your website. Not too many mind, a blog stuffed with links can be aesthetically unappealing and in turn your audience might switch off. Linking your pages allows search engines to index them more thoroughly, which as you may have guessed, will improve your ranking further. The same applies to backlinks, if you’ve taken statistics from another website or quoted another company, link back to their website and hopefully they’ll return the favour. The more high-quality backlinks you get – the better your website will rank (that’s a top tip straight out of our SEO copywriting service manual). 

Don’t Be Shy Spread The Word 

You’ve posted your blog, it’s visible to all, so what now? Share it. Utilise every social media channel at your disposal. Shout it from the rooftops, get it noticed. If your copy is truly interesting to your audience, they will share it too. Make sure you track where the traffic to your blog is coming from, and which posts perform best. This will help you to develop more exciting content and provide valuable insights into what your target audience enjoy and what they overlook. 

That’s all of the copywriting tricks and tips our team were willing to share. They’re a mysterious bunch, but our clients come back for their first-class copy every time – so we can forgive them for being slightly secretive. If planning and developing your own content sounds like a lot of work, why not outsource it? Our stellar team of copywriting experts can work with any industry from engineering to e-commerce and beyond. Share your story, connect with your audience and take your business to the next level with our copywriting services.