In this episode of the Photo Business Help Podcast, I’m going to talk about a few ways you can easily improve new and old blog posts.
The first thing you want to think about when you're doing any kind of blog posts, and I talked about this a lot, especially when I was doing the content creation classes: what is the point of what you're doing? Who are you trying to reach? Who is your ideal client? And better yet, what do you want them to do? So you want your post to have a very clear goals, something that you can measure, and something that you can fill in the blank.
If I say, I want people to “blank,” what do you want them to do?
After they've read your post, maybe you just want them to like it. Maybe you want them to share it, or you want them to email you. Perhaps you want them to comment on it. Whatever it is you want them to do, you should be very, very clear about what you want. It's okay if you just want people to click because you're trying to build up your SEO, doesn't matter. There's no right or wrong answer, but you should be very clear about it.
Who is this post intended for?
You might know what you want people to do, but if you don't know who that person is, it's going to be a little bit harder to create content. I've done a couple of worksheets in past episodes about finding your ideal client. If that's something that you think you're stuck on, or you have no idea what I'm talking about, you may want to check out https://jennings.photo/idealclient.
The next thing is your blog post's title.
It seems kind of basic, but your title in terms of SEO and traffic is really going to make a difference. And even though you're thinking of keywords, and things that are good for your site, you also just want to entice people to read it. What kinds of things are going to get people to click on your article?
Let them know what's inside, and let them know what they're going to get out of the post. If they know what they can expect to walk away with, they're going to be much more likely to click on what you're writing about.
The Yoast plugin is really going to help you with SEO and the Google bots. It will prompt you. Just remember you want people to know what they're clicking on and you want them to be excited about it. If you have a blog post you're excited to share with people but you're noticing that people aren't really clicking on it, you may just want to change the title. Play with a different title and see how that goes for you.
Next item is your tone.
It's something I struggle with on this podcast. It's the way you connect with people in your writing, if it's a really serious posts about really serious stuff, and you're acting all bubbly with your language and not really matching the message of what you're saying, it's not going to read over as well. You want to think of your tone as your vibe and your personality. So you want the tone of your writing to match how you would be in real life and what kind of things you want people to feel. We all know that language, especially from text messaging, can get read many different ways.
The final thing is readability.
The Yoast plugin will address this as well. And it has a ton of different things that they check to make sure your post is readable. There's so much noise out there, bold headings and subheading give people a chance to look at something they've already clicked on, skim over it and really decide if it's what they thought it was. And if it is, they will stay and they'll dig into it. Consider making your posts a little bit more reader-friendly so that people can get the gist of what you're saying and move on if it isn't what they thought it was and stick around if it is what they thought it was.
