Have you thought about blogging during COVID-19 lockdown?

These lockdowns can be stressful, lonely, and frustrating at times but finding ways to keep your spirits up can get you through these difficult times. I have enjoyed playing the guitar, going fishing, walks in nature, a little yoga, reading a book and chatting to close friends.

Also, as a challenge, I have been writing blogs and updating my social media for Silver Marbles. I must admit, I have been quite busy and haven’t found the time over the years. I find myself preaching to clients, blogs are good, write one every week or every month it will attract new clients to your website and have huge benefits to your rankings in the search engines. Then post your blogs to social media…. I say this but then hypocritically I haven’t been doing it that often myself!

Getting Started

You may not have a website at all, so I ask you this, have you thought about starting a business and getting a website? Or maybe you have a great idea for a blog and want to tell the world about your amazing opinions on technology, politics, fitness, knitting whatever you wish!

Setting up websites and blogs has never been so easy using WordPress. I advise you look at some of the standard themes they provide, you could get a website up and running very quickly. We use WordPress ourselves to develop websites if ever you need some help setting up a website, let me know!

Why have a blog?

Once you have a website, I do recommend marketing the website as best as possible. Most websites these days have all the content about what they offer in terms of products and services. However, they do not always provide a blog which can humanise the website by telling potentially new customers what type of company you are, the personality of the people working there and sharing lots more information on the company or industry they are in. The more you blog, the more content your website has, and the more Google will return to review your website for new content. Generally, websites with a blog rank higher in the SERPs, aka increase your visibility.

If you do not have a blog, get in touch and we can help you add a blog to your website. Again, I recommend using WordPress as its native function is blogging and the most popular out there.

Setting up a Blog

If you can set up your own blog, make sure it has the basic blog structure, a header, main content, sidebar, and a footer. See image below.

Header – this should feature a menu or a navigation bar

Main content – this should show the list of the blogs or when clicked into a blog post show the main content of the blog post

Sidebar – this should show the links to social media, the best content on your blog and any call to actions

Footer – this should show the relevant links to the disclaimer, privacy policy, contact page or any other important links.

Start Writing

This is where you need to get creative with the content. Whatever you blog about, make it your own, every human has their own opinion on the world and everything in it. Make the content unique, take your time, maybe run it past a friend or a business colleague before publishing. I also recommend writing the blog in Word or a browser which has a spell check and grammar check. My browser has Grammarly which is useful for making sure I spell things correctly and my grammar is spot on!

Here is a link www.grammarly.com

Microsoft Word also has Clarity, Conciseness, Formality, Punctuation and Vocabulary – bonus!

I would recommend having a blog minimum of 5 paragraphs of text and one image. The more content the better and separate each section with headers for the bigger blogs.

If you can add an image somewhere in the blog to space out the text this will make it more pleasant for the reader. A little colour can go a long way!

I have personally found it easier to read blogs with a decent font like Arial or Georgia, a good-sized font, and a decent amount of spacing around the text.

Posting to Social Media

Once your blog is ready it is time to post to it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Each social media platform is different, so make sure you have the featured image the correct size for each social network, Facebook is more landscape, Instagram is square. Also, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn use hashtags which can be useful to pull extra traffic in from those tags.

I would recommend writing a short 1 paragraph of text introducing the blog before the link to the blog post. This will also help your post rank in the social network better especially on Facebook.

Google

Your new blog will also get picked up on the Google search engines which is a great way to drive organic traffic to your website. Make sure you have a Google Sitemap which can help tell Google that you have a new page to be indexed.

I wish you the best of luck on your blogging journey during these difficult times, however, blogging and posting to social media should be a regular exercise to help your website visibility.