How To Blog Like a Shark!!

1. Create a Strategy  

So what is your blogging strategy? The first thing you need to do is sit down and create a blogging strategy that clearly outlines your aims. Why do you have a blog? What do you hope to achieve by writing blog posts? Who are you trying to reach? How are you going to reach these people? What messages do you want to communicate and how will you communicate them?

 Do you want to be known as an influencer or thought leader in your industry? If so then you need to be writing blog posts that position you in this way. You can do this by sharing the latest industry news or updates, or by producing content that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise in your industry. 

Maybe you want to promote your products and services? Then you need to be writing blog posts that explain to your potential customers why they need your product or service and how this will benefit them or what problems it solves for them. 

Write down what you want to achieve with your blog and then work backwards from your end goal to develop a blogging strategy that helps you achieve these aims.

2. Produce Killer Content  

So you may think, what the hell am I going to blog about? I have nothing useful to say. That’s the opinion a lot of people have but I’m sure there are lots of topics you could write about. A great idea is to write blogs that answer questions and help your customer. What problems do they have? How can you solve these through your blog posts?

Let’s take British Gas for example; their content marketing strategy and blog posts are all about helping their customers become more energy efficient.  

Check out this blog post they wrote titled 'Five Energy Saving Apps You Need In Your Life'  . This was written so they could help out their customers and position themselves as helpful and informative. 

Let's also have a look at Martin Lewis of Money Saving Expert. As you would imagine a lot of his community and the people who he is targeting will ask him what are his top tips for saving money?

So he produced a blog post called 'Top Money Saving Tips, Tricks and Treats'  That is on his website for people to read. 

Now when you type the search term 'Money Saving Tips" into Google, this blog post is the 2nd organic result that comes up on the first page of search results. So the benefits from a search engine optimisation perspective are enormous and he also positions himself as helpful and informative on this subject and the go-to-person in this industry. 

3. Select Your Favourite Channel  

So you realise that you need to be blogging to grow your business, but you realise you are not the greatest writer or you dislike writing. That’s no problem. Your blog doesn’t have to be in written text format. 

If you prefer speaking then why not do a video blog? Or if you don’t like being on camera then why not record a podcast or audio blog that people can listen to.

There’s a really great new live broadcasting platform called Periscope. People follow you on the mobile app and can view your live broadcasts. They also have the ability to write comments, which appear, on the screen whilst you broadcast and you can respond and engage with them in real time.

Periscope also posts live to your Twitter feed so your Twitter followers can watch your broadcasts.

So if you have a lot to say but don't want to write a written blog, why not do a weekly broadcast on Periscope where you talk about a particular subject each week and your community can tune in and ask live questions. 

4. Remember a Call to Action 

You need to ensure that your blog has a clear call to action. What do you want your reader, viewer or listener to do once they’ve consumed your blog?

If you want them to visit your website be sure to direct them there with the offer of there being more content there that they would enjoy.

 I wrote a blog about a training workshop SharkDog were hosting in Edinburgh and at the end I included the link to the event so people could read all of the information and then view the event on Eventbrite and sign up if they felt they would benefit from attending. 

5. Shout to the World 

So you’ve produced your blog, where are you going to host it and then how will you distribute it to your audience? You may want to host it on your website and then distribute the link to the blog post. Social media is a great way to share your blog. Share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or whatever social media platforms you currently use. 

There is a great blogging platform called Medium that allows you to write and host your blog there and people can follow you and read your posts. LinkedIn Pulse is also an amazing tool that allows you to get your blog out to a massive audience.

Once you publish a blog on here it gives all of your connections a notification that you have published a new post. Then when people start to like and comment on your blog this makes your post visible to people outside of your network.

 A great example of this is the time I wrote a blog about How Desk Union Transformed SharkDog, I wrote about all of the benefits of being based in Desk Union and how much I enjoyed it.

I published this on LinkedIn Pulse and someone seen it on LinkedIn, he enjoyed the blog so much that he decided to come in for a tour of Desk Union and then signed up to become a member.

The person I’m referring to was called David Gillespie and when I met him in Desk Union we talked about the blog and now David and I are good friends. How cool is that?

 6. Analyse Your Results 

 Like all of your marketing activities, you need to analyse your results and ensure that you are making the most of the data available to you.

Look at which posts are getting the greatest engagement and then adjust your blogging strategy to ensure you post more of the content people enjoy. 

 So say you are a business coach and you write blogs that provide hints and tips for small business owners, if you look at all of your blog analytics and notice the blogs that get most engagement are blogs about marketing, then you can clearly see these posts are the most effective and you can create more posts about marketing.

Do you have any other tips for blogging? Comment with your best ones. Or if you have any questions I'd love to answer them. 

Josh Quigley