So many VAs that I speak to say that one of their marketing goals is to write a regular blog to attract potential customers to their website, but the vast majority just don’t get round to it, either because they are up to their eyeballs in work or because they just can’t find the right topic to write about.
However, I think that even if you can’t commit to regular content creation, it’s worth setting some time aside every now and then to pull some content together as if you’ve got a business website, blogs are a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site – as long as you are writing about the right kind of things! Trust me, there’s no point investing your precious time into a blog that no-one is going to read! Take some time and do a little research first, and you’ll find that the writing process comes relatively easily.
The first thing I recommend to aspiring bloggers is a tool called ‘Keywords everywhere’ – https://keywordseverywhere.com/ – a chrome extension that provides details of how many people are actively searching for any term that you type into the Google search query box, as well as similar keywords that might be of interest to you. This is an invaluable tool if you’re looking for a topic to write about and a keyword phrase associated with that topic. The tool provides information on monthly search volumes, cost-per-click and competition levels of different keywords, and though you won’t ever receive 100% of the quoted audience for a particular keyword, with the top 5 positions on Google receiving over 67% of clicks from users (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/10/30/the-value-of-search-results-rankings/#1c848d2b44d3) it is worth doing all that you can to rank as highly as possible in the search engine results pages.
When you’re searching for keywords, think about the topics that potential customers would be interested in reading about, and might be searching for answers for online. For example, you might want to be perceived as a productivity whizz, so potential keywords like ‘ways to improve business efficiency’ (140 monthly searches, £0.46 CPC and low competition) or ‘how to make a business more efficient’ (50 searches per month, £0.81 CPC and very low competition) could make great titles!
Once you’ve decided on your title, try to incorporate the phrase naturally a couple of times into the content of your blog. If you’ve got a WordPress website, an SEO plugin like Yoast will help you to optimise a page effectively for your chosen keyword phrase (i.e. incorporating it into the slug, the meta-description, as a meta-keyword, etc.) to make things really simple!
When you’re writing your blog, don’t feel like you have to produce a ‘war and peace’-esque literary masterpiece, either in terms of the quality of writing or the number of words! A blog of around 500 words is perfectly sufficient, and as long as you have popped your writing through a spell-checker tool like ‘Grammarly’ (https://www.grammarly.com/), most people won’t complain about the fact that you are unlikely to win any literary awards…
Be yourself and share useful tips that you have gained from your work with your readers – it makes the content a great shop window for potentially interested customers to view and experience before they get the opportunity to talk to you!