Blogging is a great way to connect with your audience, position yourself as the expert and improve your google ranking.

But what if we’re not even sure what to write about, or where to start?

Here’s 7 blog tools you can use to help you get started:

1.      Answer The Public – This creepy looking guy will take your keyword and give you the actual things people are typing into google. For ‘cats’ I got ‘are cats social’ and ‘how cats play’. By knowing what people are asking, you can become the go to place for expertise about cats.

2.      Hubspot Blog Generator – here I have to enter 3 nouns. I went for ‘moisturiser’, ‘makeup’, ‘organic’ and it’s given me 5 suggestions. 1 of which is 10 quick tips about organic. Boom, I’m off to write my blog post!

3.      Buzzsumo – will analyse the content that will perform best for any topic. Most of the functions require payment, but it will give you the best performing post for any topic. If I add the keyword ‘slippers’ I’ll find out that ‘Girls who are always cold, have 2 words microwaveable slippers’. This post had 141k engagement on Facebook. I can quickly see what’s hot right now in my area.

4.      LSIgraph – this tool is a keyword generator, so I can see good longtail keywords I could use for my posts. If I post in ‘copywriting’, I get suggestions like ‘copwriting techniques’. I can then use these as a platform to start writing great blog posts.

5.      Grammarly – lets you write blog posts like a pro. Suppose grammar is not your strongest point. I know that in the 90’s it was something entirely missing from the curriculum so my whole generation struggles with this one. Grammarly lets you add an extension to chrome, and then cut and paste your entire blog post. It makes suggestions to improve your writing. Boom a better blog post!

6.      Hemmingway – This will help you make your blog bold and clear. It highlights complex sentences, so you can cut them down. You can keep working on your blog until there are no corrections left.

7.      Coschedule – Having difficulty creating your blog title? This site will help with that. Post your blog title, and it will give you a score based on word balance, type, length, emotion and how it will be read. Love this!

Here are some great tools to help you write better blog posts. And be more confident in creating great content that people will want to read.

But why is blogging important?

I met the SEO specialist Dawn Anderson at a fantastic marketing conference this week. The main take-away I got from her is that the idea of ranking on page 1 of google is dead. And yet that is what many businesses crave.

Why is this? Google is constantly keeping track of what you like, websites you visit and search terms you enter. It uses all this data to personalise your google search. So, the results you’ll see for the same search, will be different to the search I’ll see. Because we’re different. It will also change depending on the time of year, based around the kind of answers google predicts we’ll want to see.

It’s changing all the time! But that doesn’t mean we have to throw our SEO strategy out of the window, it’s just that we need to accept that it will change.

Now one of the best things we can do is create great content of value for our ideal customers. That way we’ll be answering their questions. Google will see that we’re a fantastic resource and start preferring our site in ranking.

Blogging is a key part of this and having a blogging strategy is key!

Want to work one to one with me to create a fantastic blogging strategy, take a look at my Clarity & Confidence programme. It’s a mix of online content and working with me, that will give you the skills you need to grow your business.

Want to know more about blogging?

Blogging for business – the number one rule