When I started HubSpot, I was a trained engineer with little writing experience. In the early days of the company, I couldn’t create software. Instead, I spent a lot of time writing articles for our marketing blog. As an inexperienced writer, I was pleasantly surprised by the performance. Today the blog has over 500,000 subscribers and over 10 million new visitors every month.
The blog’s success convinced me that for the past 20 years I have stifled brilliant writing skills! My excitement led me to send a thank you note to my eighth grade teacher, Tom Brown, who helped me learn to write.
Encouraged by my newfound confidence in writing, I wrote the Inbound Marketing Book with my co-founder Dharmesh Shah. When we took the final draft to a professional editor, I was confident that they would send it back with minimal changes and great praise. Not correct. The document she returned had more red lines than anything I had ever seen in my life.
After many weeks of language tinkering, we made it almost perfect. When it was released in 2014, it was ranked 200th of the 8 million books currently available on Amazon – a list topped by well-known authors such as Dan Brown and Stephen King.
I learned that you don’t have to be a great writer to have a great book. The same goes for blogs. Non-writers can develop new skills and practices that will turn your words and messages from mediocre to excellent, and in this post, I’ll tell you how.
Blogging tips for non-authors
Non-authors and great blogs are not mutually exclusive. If you don’t have formal writing training or experience, join the club. English isn’t the most popular undergraduate degree. Since 2011, there has been a 26% decrease in English degrees awarded by post-secondary institutions, while blogging has grown by 12% since 2015.
As the number of professional writers decreases and the number of blogs increases, we can infer that the number of non-authors blogging is likely to increase.
Formal education, or the lack of one, won’t stop you from running a successful blog. All you need is a couple of skills in your tool belt.
When writing your blog, you need to:
- Choose your audience and topics.
- Have a conversation.
- Include links to reputable websites (including your own).
- Make your content easy to digest.
- Use online typing assistants.
Let’s go into each of these points in depth.
1. Choose your audience and topics.
Who is your audience? It’s much easier to talk to someone when you know who they are, but it’s impossible to know every person who will read your blog posts. This is where your buyer persona comes in. A buyer persona represents your ideal customer. Once you’ve established your audience and their needs, you can figure out what to talk about.
Keyword research should determine the content that you share with your readers. Keywords are words and phrases that people type or speak in search engines. There are several ways to do keyword research, but a typical starting point is to evaluate the monthly search volume (MSV) for industry-related terms.
Monthly search volume is the total number of searches performed for a specific keyword in a month. A simple example could be a greeting card store’s keyword research. November searches would show you, unsurprisingly, that the search volume for the keyword “thank you cards” is higher than the keyword “Easter cards”. These results, combined with research on keyword difficulty, will guide you to your target keywords for the month.
Once you’ve established your buyer persona and keywords, it’s time to start a conversation with our audience.
2. Have a conversation.
Your blog is not an opportunity to bring your English homework to life. Trust me, you don’t have to refer to a thesaurus and get the longest words out of the dictionary to get your point across. I know already. Instead, imagine you are talking to a friend when you are writing a post. Be knowledgeable, yet personable. Be authoritative and still relatable. Your readers don’t want to be talked down. They want quality information from a credible source that they can understand, and it is your responsibility to provide it.
3. Add links to reputable websites (including your own).
As you can see, there is no one rule for writing a great blog. Most of the rules about blogging aren’t even related to writing. Link building is an example of this.
Link building can increase the quality of your content and the credibility of your blog. Focus on interlinks and backlinks.
connections
Interlinks are links that take the reader back to the content of your website. This gives your other content more relevant visibility and helps search engine site crawlers index more pages on your site. This is great news for your SEO efforts! Another great benefit is increasing the amount of time readers spend on your website. By using links, you are providing your readers with relevant resources to expand their knowledge on the subject. It increases your credibility as a source, and the more credible your visitors find your blog, the more successful it will be.
Backlinks
There is an infinite amount of information on the Internet, but not all of it is credible or accurate. You can help readers find other great content by providing backlinks to reputable websites.
A backlink is a link from one website to another. If your blog links to another website, they have a backlink from you. If a website links to your content, you have one of them. But you may be wondering why you want to remove traffic from your blog?
In short, search engines like to see websites give credit where it is due. Backlinks are a great way to reinforce your blog article so that the reader can learn more about your point of view.
The key to a strong backlink strategy is putting quality over quantity. Build your content around information from reliable sources. You are not guaranteed to get backlinks from other websites, but you can increase your chances by using the tips on this page to create quality content.
4. Make your content easy to digest.
What you write is valuable – we know that. You also need to be careful how you write and present your information. Nobody wants to open a webpage with a sea of endless words trickling down the page. The important information is easily lost. Your reader will too. The time you spend on your blog is limited. Your goal is to keep their attention while giving them the information they want as easily as possible. To do this, use:
Headings and sub-headings
Many readers do a visual scan of a webpage before deciding to delve deeper into the content. Here you can see how important headings and sub-headings are. Treat them as an outline or summary of your blog post. Use them to highlight your key points so readers can quickly determine the value of your information.
Lists
When presenting information to your readers, use lists whenever possible. Explain your key points and structure your text to make your content easier to understand and remember. Vary between numbered lists and bullet points. Use numbered lists to prioritize order and bullet points when there is no order of importance.
Imagery
If your content allows it, use tables and charts. There are reasons to add these visuals to presentations often. First, you can present the same information in a different, more exciting way. Second, you can accommodate visual learners. It may take hundreds of words to explain your point, but a table will either complement or summarize your information and break up the monotony of your text.
5. Use online typing assistants.
Fifteen years ago, most of the writing aid came from the red and green lines that appear in a Microsoft Word document. Now there are many tools out there to help you improve your writing. Options available for free typing assistant software include Writefull, 1Checker, and Grammarly.
A popular spelling and grammar checker tool, Grammarly offers suggestions based on correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery. The platform breaks your writing down into overall performance, readability, and vocabulary. Do you keep confusing “as” with “then”? Do you need to double-check your use of Affect and Effect? Tools like Grammarly easily catch these little mistakes to improve your content.
The content of your blog isn’t the only help you might need. Your blog content is strategic, but so is optimizing your blog for SEO. While SEO is a long conversation that needs to be had for all of the content you post on the internet, another aspect that you can get help with writing is your SEO title tag. The title tag appears as the name of your website on a search engine results page (SERPs) and can be clicked on to the link target. CoSchedule, a marketing resource, offers its Headline Analyzer as a tool for creating better headlines that can lead to increased SEO value, traffic, and social shares.
Great blogs don’t need great writers.
You don’t need a degree in English or creative writing to run a successful blog. You need identity and value. Determine who to write to and what to say. Identify yourself as a knowledgeable and reliable source who creates value with your content and relevant content on the Internet. Enhance your blogs with visuals if necessary, and if you can’t proofread your content, let someone (or something else) do it for you.
Blogs have to be written with strategy. Use these tips to build yours.
