Looking for tips on writing a blog? A blog is a good way of building your online presence and generating sales on your website or simply building more opportunities for people to find you! A blog is simply a Web log about whatever you deem fit to write about. However it is a good idea to write content based on what your specific niche area covers. You want to attract people to your website who want what you are offering – particularly if you are looking for more paying customers.
Think about that for a minute. What are you selling and how will your customers find you? When you can answer that question very well you can head over to the keyword tool at Google – now called the ‘keyword planner‘ and have a look at some long tail keywords. I say long tail because you have a much better chance of finding your specific customers through using long tail keywords.
What is a long tail keyword?
Whenever you type a word or phrase into the Google search bar, or any other search engine for that matter, that phrase is known as a keyword. Say for instance you typed “tips on writing a blog” you may have found an article like this one. Short keywords might be something like “pentax camera” or “Comedy DVD” for example. Longer tail keywords just have more words in them and therefore we are more likely to rank on a search engine for them should anyone look them up.
For example I created an article for a friend of mine who produces and sells guitar straps. These straps allow you to spin the guitar much like ZZ top in his video. By typing a few keywords into the keyword planner I was able to find a few long tail keyword phrases which are regularly searched for in this area. Try typing “zz top spinning guitar strap” into Google and you will find his site. I wrote the article specifically around this long tail keyword phrase and Paul gets a number of sales from this search through Google for free and potentially for a lifetime! You can see Paul’s site here:Â http://www.mundomusicgear.co.uk/. Have a look also for “invisible guitar strap” and “ergonomic guitar strap” on Google and these terms should also bring up the site near the top of Google.
Just by specifically targeting long tail keyword phrases in your specific niche, you can generate some long term traffic strategies. By starting off with a little research like this you can get much more out of your articles by finding relevant and highly targeted traffic.
Use your keywords in your article
Once you have found a specific keyword phrase which gets a few monthly hits  it is a good idea to check how competitive it is in Google so you will know if you have a chance of ranking it. This will also depend on the authority of your site which has several factors, however if you pick a good phrase with little competition you can easily rank each article and find your visitors through the search engines. Using the above example of my friend’s site we can type into Google the phrase in quotation marks like this “zz top spinning guitar strap” which brings up about 48 results. For the title of this article “tips on writing a blog” I found it came up with 80,100 results so my chance of ranking this article is not as good as the ZZ Top one! Have a look at “ergonomic guitar strap” and “invisible guitar strap” in terms of competitive pages.
Content is king
Although it’s a good idea to use your keyword in the first line of your type, the main body of text and in your title, you still need to provide interesting content to give your visitors good value. I usually write at least 400 word articles although the longer the better. Don’t spam your article with your keywords hoping to ‘trick’ the search engines but write naturally for your target audience. Make sure you keyword is in the title, meta description and tags as well as in your article itself and url (the long line at the top of the page or website address). Url actually means ‘Uniform Resource Locator’.
Thanks for reading my tips on writing a blog and good luck with your free traffic generation!