Blog Better with These 3 Tools
February 15, 2019
Blogs are a major component to digital marketing. Not only do they tell the story of your brand and offer something more substantial than a webpage to your customers, they also provide ample opportunity for SEO. Search engine optimization is a key component to a successful online business. With Google taking up three fourths of the world’s searches, following their algorithm and finding yourself in the top section of query responses will get your brand noticed big time.
Research shows that consumers rarely go past the first page of results following a search, which means that to be noticed you need to rise to the top of competitors in rank. You can do this by creating a better blog, which hits all the algorithm requirements from Google and gives your customers what they want to read.
Blogging is a point of contention for many business owners. It’s time consuming, and a bit confusing if you’re not sure what you should be writing about. Hiring a blog and social media management team helps, but if you don’t have the money, what can you do to get ahead? Here are 3 amazing tools your company should try this year to make your blog read better than the rest.
1. Hemingway: He’s not just a famous literary genius, Hemingway is also an application used for online writing. The tool helps you craft a better article or blog post by highlighting large portions of your work which needs to be changed. Each highlighted section is color coded to a different type of change requirement. For example, if a section is highlighted in red, it means the sentence you’ve written is unnecessarily complicated and could be typed in a simpler and easier to follow format. Purple means you need to whip out the thesaurus for an easier sounding synonym. Blue calls you out on too many adverbs, which are generally filler in marketing copy. Green suggests your content isn’t as engaging as it could be. Yellow offers the notion of shortening your sentences or paragraph and restructuring.
This is an excellent tool because it outlines what you’ve done wrong and offers working solutions, rather than changing it for you. After a while, you’ll catch on and learn from your mistakes and you’ll no longer need Hemingway by your side. That is unless you have an urge to read, “The Old Man and the Sea”.
2. Grammarly: You’ve probably heard of this one while watching one of your favorite streaming video sites. Grammarly has ads all over the internet, but don’t let that put you off. This tool is precisely what it sounds like, an app that helps fix your grammar. Before you publish any blog, Grammarly will pick out typos, incorrectly placed commas, misspelled words, run-on sentences, and more. Like Hemingway, Grammarly uses a highlight method to show you where punctuation or spelling went wrong and then offers suggestions to change it. It can be used as an external tool, by copying and pasting text to be evaluated, and can also be used as a browser extension and run following the completion of an article.
Even the most proficient writer can use Grammarly to pinpoint and correct small errors before publication. There’s nothing more embarrassing than trying to post something for your business only to be told you’ve misspelled something simple. It’s easy to overlook typos when you’re worrying about content quality, target audiences and Google algorithms.
3. Buzzsumo: Finally, there’s Buzzsumo, a tool that sifts through months of posts you’ve made and figures out which ideas were best. Buzzsumo uses analytics software to distinguish which Facebook posts, blog updates, etc., made your users like, share, and comment the most. This is particularly useful if you’re suffering from writer’s block or are generally unsure about what to write next.
This tool can tell you which category users are most interested in, keywords and topics which piqued interest, and how to go about constructing a new article based on these specifications. Half the battle of writing new content is determining what your consumers want to see. It’s a bit of a gamble every time you write something, because you never know if it will be part of the latest trend or overlooked as something too closely related to a past trend.
Using blogging tools like the ones above can help you vastly improve your writing style and improve customer engagement, traffic flow and ROI. The content you publish says a lot about your brand, but it also defines who comes to your site and these are going to be your customers. Much of the web traffic that populates from these blog posts will come and go without ever buying from your business, but the article you’ve written still has the potential to stick out in a customer’s mind as something they enjoyed reading. This memory is what will draw him or her back in if they ever want a product or service like yours. They’ll remember that great article about the thing that made them want to know more about you, and they’ll click back over to your site. These returning potential customers can always become loyal customers later, which is why it’s crucial to create genuine, relatable, engaging content.
Don’t just write to have something on your website, write to tell your customers who you are and why you’re the best. Then use these tools to streamline and publish amazing copy.