You’ve been hearing all the buzz about starting a blog and you’re finally ready to get started but where do you even start? If you’ve been blogging for a little while but you’re ready to take your advisor website and blogging to the next level this article is for you. We’ve put together a checklist that each and every blog post should go through to ensure its success.
Know your target audience
When writing any type of content it’s important know who you are speaking to. Define if your ideal client is married, has kids, income level, financial goals, career, etc. If you take some time to break down and clearly define who your ideal client is, it will help write on topics that are important to them.
Who are you looking to get in front of? Who is your ideal client? Understanding your ideal client profile is crucial in creating valuable content.
You may or may not have heard of buyer personas. By clearly defining your buyer persona, you’ll know your target audience’s interests, challenges and goals. If you’re able to speak to them and address topics that are on their mind, they will likely connect with you and build trust with you over time.
Define the goal of your article
Just like you set financial goals with clients, it’s important to set a goal with each blog article. When you do this, it makes it easy to ensure that you’ve met that goal when you get to the editing step of this process.
Take a few minutes and think about, is your goal to educate, motivate, inspire, inform, create action or simply remind your audience of something that they already know is important to them. Whatever goal you decide, it’s important to define it and keep it in mind as you write your article.
Do some basic keyword research
The keyword planner tool gives insight into what keywords should be used within your post. Having the right keywords can significantly impact how an article is found online Google. Use the Google keyword planner tool to determine what keywords people would search for to get to your blog article. If search volume is low, consider changing the keywords to be something that is more relevant to your audience.
Keyword research is not just about search volume but it’s also about understanding the way in which your audience is searching for information. It’s a way of getting inside the minds of prospective customers. What are they thinking about? What are they searching for online?
When you write your article, incorporate those keywords throughout the post. If possible, put them in your title and in your URL. This will allow Google bots to read your article and help it to rank.
Create a basic outline
Creating a basic outline will allow you to gather your thoughts before you just start typing away. This might seem like extra work that is not needed but when time is spent upfront to create a basic outline, you end up saving time later on because the ideas and points have already been identified.
What’s the theme?
What is the main topic?
What are the key points you want to make?
Take a few minutes and think about, is your goal to educate, motivate, inspire, inform, create action or simply remind your audience of something that they already know is important to them.
Come up with a working title
Some writers get their best titles after they have completed their article. It’s a good idea to have a working title that helps you stay on topic. A title can be the single most important thing in your article. It is what will get people to click on your article and read it. If your title isn’t compelling enough, your readers will click on something else.
A successful title should include one or many of these characteristics.
Intellectual
Empathetic
Spiritual
Evokes Emotion
You can use tools like Headline Analyzer or the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer to verify how compelling your headline is.
Hook readers in the first paragraph
The attention span of readers is shorter than ever so it’s important get their attention in the first paragraph but even better if you can do this in the first 2-3 sentences. Often people will use trends, statistics, facts to do this.
Some ideas for starting your blog post: A personal story; something controversial or surprising; an interesting statistic or fact; a thought-provoking question, etc. Is there something happening in the news that resonate with your audience?
Write the post
Most people will start here. They have an idea, open up a document and start typing. Without doing steps 1-6, you will be able to write the article but it might not be a quality article that your audience will want to read. Too often, people are clear about who they want as clients or who they are trying to reach but forget about them when the article is being written.
Throughout the process, ask yourself:
• What obstacles or challenges might my audience being trying to overcome?
• What information would be valuable to my audience?
• Is the tone and language being used going to resonate with my audience?
If advisors write with these questions in mind, the article will likely hit home and create a positive impression with your target audience.
Add quality images
If you think of an article you saw recently that didn’t have quality images, you probably didn’t have a positive impression. The article could have been providing the best content in the world but if the images are poor quality or don’t really fit, that will impact the ability for your article to be successful.
You might be wondering, where do I get quality images from? Here are a few websites that you can get quality images from for free or for fairly cheap.
Add a call to action
Throughout your article and more importantly at the end, include a call to action. What action do you want your audience to take? Do you want them to contact you? Is there another article you want them to read? Is there a page that outlines your services you want them to visit?
By adding a call to action, Hubspot found that conversions rates increase by 121%.
Edit Edit Edit.
You’re almost there. You have gone through steps 1-9 but don’t hit that publish button just yet. Before you publish and promote it to your audience make sure you take some time to edit your work. Revisit the title you wrote at the beginning, does it still fit with the content that was written. There are some headline analyzer tools, you can use to test your headline such as the one on CoSchedule or the one on Advanced Marketing Institute.
Have someone read your article. Sometimes, when writing an article it’s easy to get caught up in a train of thought or an idea that you have and you just start typing. That being said, it’s easy to make mistakes with grammar, spelling or the flow of your thoughts.
Once you’ve finished you editing process, it’s time to publish. The work doesn’t stop there. Now, you need to promote the article to ensure your target audience sees it and reads it. If you are on social media, be sure to share your article on these channels. If you have an email newsletter that you send to your prospects and clients, include your recent article in your newsletters.
If this process seems long, you could go ahead and write a blog post without any kind of strategy but how effective will that be? Just like when you advise clients about investing, do you tell them how to invest without any sort of plan? I didn’t think so.
