Carrie Morgan — January 11, 2017 Follow @TheSalesWayWe’ve put together a handy list of some useful tools to help you get started writing blogs or help you to improve your current blog writing practices.
Some of these tools are ones we use ourselves when developing content for clients – and can help you to refine your B2B blogs so that your content really speaks to prospects and customers.
So, whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a b2b sales rep new to the world of blogging and publishing articles on LinkedIn, we hope our list of B2B blog writing tools can help!
Step 1 – Planning your topic
You might have the overall topic in mind, such as “Reducing IT costs”, but how do you know what the top performing articles and headlines are? Buzzsumo is a useful tool for checking how popular certain articles are in your particular topic area. This helps you to come up with different angles for your blog focus, because – after all – the topic will probably always be the same, but the angle will be tweaked to reveal new insights.
Step 2 – Writing your blog
A blank page can be the most intimidating thing at times – and usually once you start writing, the content flows. To help you get started, this free blog planner tool from My Sales Academy can help you to plan out a B2B blog, guiding you through the process of writing a blog and figuring out how to structure your content in a compelling way.
Once you get a clear structure for your blog, you can use this again and again to plan out future blogs and ensure your content tells a clear and compelling story.
Step 3 – Reviewing and editing your blog
Now that you’ve written your blog, you need to proof-read it a few times. Our first drafts looking nothing like our final drafts, because ideas build, stories don’t translate and sections are taken out and replaced. Never scrimp on the editing and reviewing section because it can really make all the difference between an average blog post and a compelling piece of content that is shared widely.
We often use readability scores to test if our content is readable and simple to understand. We use a tool that’s built into our blogging platform, but sometimes run our content through web tools such as Readability-Score.com. For example, this blog has a readability score of 61 on the Flesch reading-ease test, meaning that it is described as “Plain English. Easily understood by 13- to 15-year-old students,” (Wiki). Readability is important because it can potentially affect your Google ranking if content is deemed ‘unreadable’ or difficult to understand – but it’s generally just a good idea to make your writing as easy as possible to consume.
It’s also a good idea to check that none of your content has been printed elsewhere online, or that you haven’t lifted text unknowingly from another source. Copyscape can be used to check text against other online published content – especially useful if you contract out the writing of your content, so that you can be sure writers haven’t copied text from elsewhere.
Step 4 – Get the headline right!
Now that you’ve written your article, it’s time to start thinking about a compelling headline to bring readers in. Using a headline analyser can help to guide your headline towards using more emotive and attractive words. For example, headlines with words such as “How to…” tend to attract more readers than those with purely descriptive titles. It’s like first impressions, you have just a few moments to capture a reader’s attention – so make it count.
Step 5 – Promotion, promotion, promotion
So you’ve written your blog, you’ve probably published it on LinkedIn – now what? There are tools out there to help you find the most popular hashtags to ensure that the most people possible see your Tweets – tweetreach helps by finding popular hashtags around your chosen topic so that you can be sure you’re using the most valuable hashtags when promoting your blog or article across social media.
These are just a handful of the tools we use – depending on the topic, audience or article, we employ different tools to help create content that drives engagement and is better tailored to the appropriate audience.
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