Part 2: Why we need to write How-to Blog Topics
A Marketing article written by Denise Belcher
In Part 1: we focused on how to generate leads and boost SEO from blog writing. Part 2 will look into maximising your content strategy and learn how to write a How -To Topic Blog. Now it's your turn to become the teacher and the thought leader for your industry.
Choosing Your How-To Topic
Begin with brainstorming a How-To List of topics? Because How-To Blogs are so well received by your audience and more read than most other types of blogs, pull together a list of ideas that can be part of your evergreen series of blogs. Remember that these How-To Blogs can remain part of your staple website content and can be used season to season, year to year with little or no need for much in the way of upkeep.
Put yourself in the position of your client, and think about what they'd like to learn how to do. Think about what you get a lot of support calls about? What are trending topics in your industry that you think interests the majority of your audience? What does your sales or admin team think would interest your customer as they are the ones that talk to them on a daily basis? Use the people that understand your customers to gather topics as they speak to them on a day to day basis and would gather a variety of valuable ideas and feedback that can be used to educate your customer further. By writing a series of How-To Blogs you can also use these as training tools, thus reducing your internal support calls, and all the while providing better customer satisfaction. It's a Win-Win Result!
At Aspedia, we educate ourselves daily to stay on top of the latest marketing trends, we provide marketing services to clients, and we develop content strategies to increase rankings. We have found that our customers are constantly trying to learn how to be better communicators with their clients and to provide information that is important to them, hence why we have written this specific blog.
So after establishing which topics will be of interest to your audience, choose a specific title for each topic to know exactly what you're going to be instructing your readers to do. Maybe include some dot points of the key strategies that you want to address in each blog topi so that when you go to write them it is much easier to pull the information together.
Set up a spreadsheet of titles that you think will be useful and then start to work out a structure of which ones will go first and which ones can link to others to increase your internal page linking (dependant blogs). By linking within this assists the reader and helps with increasing your search engine optimisation rankings and results.
Brainstorm the Steps From Start to Finish
Now that you have your spreadsheet of topics, some basic dot points of the content strategy that you want to use, where it will link off to, and rough blog titles, you can get started on your blog.
Your next task is to write a rough outline of your How-To Blog. In this, you will need to detail the individual steps your readers will take . Think about what it is you're teaching them how to do. You could use paragraphs of numbering to identify the individual steps, or more effectively, make each step a header. Then you can return to each of the headers and fill in the blank information that goes with each of them. Add sub headings if you think this will be helpful to your user as it breaks up the content in a more readable format.
When setting up this basic plan in a bare bones format, ensure that your steps are laid out in a logical order and that they are easy to read, written in plain text format, using no jargon, comprehensive and informative. In other words, ensure that the most uneducated of readers can follow the steps easily and can successfully complete what you are trying to instruct them to do. Break it down logically and ensure that you are not missing any critical steps in the process? Try to remember that you are teaching someone the basics of how to do something that they have little, to no knowledge of, so it is critical to make sure that you have included every step of the process.
