MBA1921 How to Easily Write a Valuable Blog Post

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life.

But once I automated the admin side.

Of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel.

Core Ultra processors will help you do.

More faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings.

Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, welcome to the $100 MBA show. Delivering valuable business lessons every single day.

With our daily 10 minute business lessons.

For the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn how to easily write a valuable blog post. For many of us, writing blog posts can be intimidating. Sitting there with a blank screen, it's sometimes hard to come up with the content you know you can produce you know people want. But how do you get started? How do you get the ball rolling? How do you make sure you can repeat this process every time you have to write a blog post so you don't waste time during this process? I learned very early on that you got to have a system, you got to have a procedure to follow, something that you can go to every single time. So you just implement what it says on that procedure so you're not left there stuck in front of your computer. We're also going to get into how to make sure it's valuable that people actually want to read this blog post and continue to read it. You want to make sure your posts are referable, shareable and a reference for many people. For years to come. Google loves rich content, and you're going to produce it with today's lesson.

So let's get into it.

Let's get down to business.

When the flu is keeping you up at night, don't try to tough it out. Knock out your flu symptoms with nyquil Intense Flu. You got this. It provides powerful relief of your flu symptoms so you can sleep well through the night. Nyquil Intense Flu the Nighttime Sniffling, aching, aching fever. Best sleep with a flu medicine Use as directed. Keep out of reach of children One.

Of the easiest ways to produce great, valuable blog posts is to break down the process into small steps. Running a blog post is like building a house. It can seem overwhelming. How am I going to do all the things you need to do to build a house? From surveying the land to building the foundation, to the exterior to the interior to the furnishings, to the lighting, to everything. You think, oh my gosh, this is so much. Where do I begin? How do I start? And for most people, they just spend so much time wasted on Instagram looking at beautiful homes. Same thing with a blog post. Many people will just spend lots of time on the Internet searching how to write a blog post, what makes a great blog post. And it really isn't helpful because you're really just wasting time. You're procrastinating because you don't have steps to take. Now, I'm not a prolific writer, but I know how to put together a pretty good blog post following the steps that I created for myself over the years. So I want to share these steps with you to make things simple for you. Let's start from the beginning. Every blog post starts with a topic, and the topic is really half the work. Okay, but maybe they come up with a topic and they write the blog post and they put the multimedia and all that kind of stuff in the post all in one shot. I think it's actually quite easy to come up with all your top topics that you want to write in the future of your blog separately from the time you write it. So you just go and take the next topic and start going. So my first step is actually taking a big step back and saying you should dedicate some time to just coming up with all the topics you want to cover on your blog. Now I want to put a little note here. Okay, Your topic is not necessarily the title of your blog post. Titles need to be crafted, they need to be molded. We're going to get into SEO and all that other stuff later on, but right now all you're just Thinking about is ideas, what ideas you want to cover. So these topics don't need to be well written. They just need to be written and be putting down. And I literally have a spreadsheet with all my topics. I do this with the podcast as well, by the way. And later on I craft a better title. And actually I work with my team on the title after it is written. But right now, the first step in this whole process is have a topic bank. Now, some of these topics you're going to know, you want to write about, because you know your audience, you know your product, you know your topic, you know your business, you know your market. So you know there's certain topics you want to cover. But those ideas will run out quickly. And I like to have 30, 40, 50 topics in my bank at all times. One of the easiest ways to come up with great topics for your blog is to use an SEO tool. You can use something like Ahrefs or serpstat is what we use. And basically these tools will allow you to know what people are searching for when it comes to your website, when it comes to your topic, when it comes to your business, your market, what phrases, what titles, what things are they putting in the search box in Google, when it comes to your market. For example, for our webinar software, Webinar Ninja, on our blog, one of our most popular blog posts has a topic that deals with when is the best time for a webinar. And that title actually came from one of our searches using a tool like Surf Stat or Ahrefs. A lot of people are searching for this topic looking for answers here. So you don't need to guess. You can use tools to help you come up with topics. So let's say you have a bank of topics. Now you take a topic off that bank, off the spreadsheet, and now you're ready to start writing. Now, every blog post will have a different type of format, meaning you might have a list post like 21 things to do to improve your customer service. That's a list post where you're listing 21 different things to help serve your topic right. Another one could be a mindset or a strategy dealing with one thing or one idea that you're trying to drive home. This could be a topic like why it's important to be authentic on your webinars. But whatever the format is, there is the juice of the blog post. And I like to start with the juice. I like to start with the meat. Why? Because a lot of us, we try to start writing blog Posts in a linear fashion, like how am I going to start this blog post? How am I going to introduce this topic? Some people actually say a lot. How do I get this started? Well, don't worry about the start. Right now you can get started by just writing what you know, what is the information you want to convey and you can literally write notes. This could be sort of like a loose outline. And this is what I do. Let's say, for example, I had a blog on text and gadgets and I wanted to write a blog post on how to choose the best laptop for you. Before I go into intro and do a conclusion, the me is really where I start because this is the easiest thing to get going because it's kind of the information I already know I want to convey. So I would write down some ideas in an outline like budget and how you use your laptop. Do you need a graphics card, a good graphics card because you play games? I might go into Mac versus Windows. I'm just writing down ideas now. The things I want to convey in this blog post. This allows the ball to roll, keeps things moving and allows your creative juices rolling. Notice I'm not writing anything in paragraph formula. I'm just writing down ideas because I can flesh that out later on. I then take those ideas and write a paragraph or two about each idea that I'm trying to convey in the meat of the blog post. When I'm writing these paragraphs, I really am trying to cover what's most important about each of these ideas. I try to be as to the point as possible and really share the ideas I think most people need to know or the ideas I wish I knew before I knew them. Right now, after you finished the meat of the blog post, you got six or seven maybe paragraphs because you conveyed your ideas. It's much easier to start with an intro now. Now that you have the meat done, it's easy to say how do I introduce these ideas? And usually it just flows so much easier. It just comes to me so much easier. I can look at my me and say choosing a laptop doesn't have to be diffic. In this blog post we're going to cover certain topics like budget, Mac versus Windows and whether if you need to spend money on expensive things like a graphics card or not. I'm also going to share with you where best to buy your laptop to get the best warranty. So now that the me is done, the intro is super simple. Same thing goes with the closing. With my summary, it will be easy once The MI is done. Now, once I have it all written, it's always healthy to have somebody to proofread it to another set of eyes to take a look at it. There could be some typos, there could be some grammar that needs to be fixed. There are a lot of tools for stuff like that, like Grammarly and all that kind of stuff, but there's nothing like another pair of eyes. If you have someone in your team to look at it, that'd be great. Maybe even a friend or family member. That would be awesome too. Just somebody else to review it and read it through. Once that's done, I now can start thinking about what's a great title now that I have it all written up that matches what people are looking for via keywords using my SEO tool, and also matches the actual blog posts. Now that I have hypothetically written this blog post with you, a great title would be how to save money on a laptop by not buying things you don't need, or buying options you don't need, or buying features you don't need. I can start playing around with different versions of the title and I can come up with one. I'm almost done with my blog post. I'm ready to publish it. But now I need to add some media. Google loves multimedia for blog posts. If you can add some images, add some GIFs, add some video, it's going to enrich your reading experience because you're going to break it up with some imagery and some entertainment and it's going to tell Google, hey, people really like this blog post because people are going to spend more time on the page because they're going through this media, watching the video, checking out the GIFs, looking at the pictures. It's going to break things up and it's going to add some visual aids to your blog posts. Now, I like to write blog posts that are a minimum 1500 words. And I just. My own personal rule of thumb is for every 500 words, I like to have some sort of piece of media, image, gif, video. And you can just use that rule if you're not sure how much multimedia you should add.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

Alright, to wrap up today's lesson, don't overwhelm yourself when it comes to writing your blog post, break it down into a procedure, into steps. Let's recap. Step 1 have a bank of topics. These don't have to be perfectly written, they're just ideas. And you can use like something like Serpstat or Ahrefs to come up with topics that people are searching for. When it comes to your market, choose a topic and start with the meat. Start with the ideas that you're trying to convey with this topic. Start from the middle. Write two to three paragraphs for each idea you're trying to convey for that topic. From there, the intro will just come to you and your outro. Or your conclusion is going to be so much easier because you're just concluding everything you already written. From there, you're going to get a fresh pair of eyes to review your blog posts. You're going to do some final editing, and then you're going to add some multimedia, images, GIFs, video. My rule of thumb is one piece of media for every 500 words. And the last thing I should mention is the title. Come up with the title after you've written everything. You can do it before you add the multimedia or after. But the point is that once everything is written, the title will be so much easier to come up with. And you can use some of the things you've learned through those SEO tools to make sure that you're using the words that people are searching for. There you have it. That wraps up today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to make sure you don't miss an episode, make sure you hit, subscribe or follow on whatever podcast app you listen to or use. That way you never miss an episode. Also, by subscribing, you get access over 1900 episodes in our archives. Tons of lessons for you to consume. In tomorrow's episode, we cover a different way to charge for your services. If you're looking for an innovative way to charge for the services you offer and you're a little bit hesitant about raising prices, this is a great strategy that I want to share with you tomorrow. So so make sure you tune in tomorrow for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the number one activities I recommend to all entrepreneurs is to blog. Not only is blogging great for SEO for your site, but it's a great exercise in communication. If you master the art of communicating your ideas, you can't lose, okay? It's the mother of all skills. If you're a great communicator, you're going to be great at sales because you're going to be able to connect people in a simple way of your value. But if you're a poor communicator it's going to be hard for people to understand why they should spend their money on your products. Blogging really builds that muscle of communication. It makes you think about what you're writing, your ideas and how to convey them. And the only way to get better is to keep doing it. So just build that muscle. Get the reps in just like you do in the gym. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately by switching to Geico you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.