For many aspiring authors, writing a book is the conclusion of a life-long dream. Many of us first dreamed of becoming writers when we were children, because we wanted to emulate our heroes – Enid Blyton in my case, perhaps JK Rowling for the younger generation. And when we finally find the time, the place, …
One of the biggest hurdles many business owners face when they start a blog is knowing what to write about. Everyone has their own unique knowledge and experience but it can be tricky working out where your expertise lies and how you can translate it into something that other people will want to read. I’ve …
One of the questions I’m often asked is: How often should I update my blog? And my answer is normally “once a week” – which is often enough to capture all the benefits of blogging yet still manageable within anyone’s busy working week. Other bloggers will have different opinions – some think once a month is …
Over the last few months I’ve offered some guest blogging opportunities and that has resulted in some really interesting and varied posts appearing on this site. (Guest blog posts are posts written by other business owners on a topic of their choice, loosely related to what I’m doing here.) I love reading other people’s blogs …
I owe a lot to Lord Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, because his maxim “to inform, educate and entertain” has helped me hugely with my blog writing. I’m often asked how to write the perfect blog post and while there’s no such thing as “perfect”, I do reply that the best blog posts achieve …
Anyone who knows me will know that I’m always banging on about how blogging is the best online marketing tool for small businesses – and it’s true, the evidence backs it up. Online marketing experts Hubspot report annually on how effective inbound marketing (getting people to come to you) is over outbound marketing (sending info like direct …
Time for another guest blog post, this time from Alison Wren on how you can use blogging to improve your website SEO. Search optimisation is often given as a key reason for maintaining a blog. However, this won’t happen automatically – you need to take specific actions if you want to achieve higher search rankings …
When it comes to blogging for business, one of the biggest problems people have is knowing what to write about. At the recent Social Media Insight Day I spoke at I came up with a few exercises to get the creative juices flowing, and everyone found them really useful. (There’s another one coming up in …
Time for a guest blogger … today Izzy Woods offers some crucial copywriting tips. If you write on a regular basis, you’ve probably found your flow – meaning that when you write, the words seem to just appear on the page. You may then simply send the writing to its final destination, assuming the job’s …
Blogging is great for websites – it lets you target niche keywords, gives you something to share on social media sites and keeps you website’s content fresh and regularly updated. However, pages and pages of text with no images can look dull and off-putting – but stock image libraries can be expensive and it’s often …
