Become a “Niche Journalist”: Why You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Start (and Grow) an Online Business

Image by @MrMediaTraining

Tell me if this describes you:

You have a few topics for an online business floating around in your head, and would love to pick one and start building your online empire around it. But this thought keeps coming into your head:

“I’m not an expert in topic X. Don’t I need to be an expert to enter this market?”

The short answer to this question is “Absolutely not!”

In this post I’ll describe:

1.      Why you don’t need to be an expert to start a niche website/business

2.      How you can get around the “authority” issue by becoming a “niche journalist”

3.      My own experience in launching products in markets in which I’m not an expert, and how I have leveraged the expertise of others

Why “Expertise” Shouldn’t Hold You Back from Starting Your Niche Empire

Did you know that according to a (disputed) study, 33% of high school graduates in the United States never read another book for the rest of their lives?

Here are some other startling stats from that study:

• 42% of college graduates never read another book after college.
• 80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
• 57% of new books are not read to completion.

Surprising? Hardly. I’m sure we all know people who don’t have the time (or interest) to read, or maybe we fall into that category ourselves.

But before you shed a tear for book publishers, think about what that means: if you’re passionate about a topic, it probably means that you’ve read more about that topic than most people.

And even if you haven’t, by simply reading three books about that topic (an approach recommended by Tim Ferris), you’ll be more knowledgeable than the vast majority of people.

More importantly, as bloggers like Dave Navarro, Rob Cornish, and Tim Conleysuggest, you don’t need to be an “absolute” expert in a niche to start your own website – because expertise exists on a continuum.

In other words, you might not be the most knowledgeable person in the world about yoga for seniors, but you’re more knowledgeable than some people. And those people who are interested in yoga for seniors, but are less knowledgeable than you? That’s your target audience!

The bottom line is that if you wait until you’re a world-class expert in a niche before starting your online business, you will be waiting a LONG time. Better to take action and start serving those who know less than you.

Forget Authority – Start by Being a “Niche Journalist”

So how do you start serving an audience if you’re not an established authority in a niche? Become a niche journalist!

Here’s my definition of a “niche journalist”:

A person who collects and disseminates information about a topic that he/she feels passionate about, by gathering the best content on the Web and in books, and by interviewing experts.

Like a conventional journalist, a niche journalist acts as a reporter on their topic, researching facts, interviewing credible sources of information, and writing about it in their column (which, for a niche journalist, is a blog).

Unlike traditional journalists, however, niche journalists have multiple streams of income through their ever-growing portfolio of websites.

Their income comes from advertising links placed on their sites (e.g. Google AdSense), and information products that they sell (both affiliate products, and products that they have created after listening carefully to the needs of their niche audience).

How the “80/20 Rule” Relates to Niche Journalism

I’ll describe how I’ve used niche journalism to build my online business in a moment, but first I want to ask: have you ever heard of the “80/20 rule”?

It’s a pretty simple concept: in the early 1900s an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto made an intriguing observation: 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. (Don’t ask me how he discovered that. I guess Italian economists had a lot of time on their hands in the early 1900s.)

The “80/20″ rule (also called the Pareto Principle) has since become a rule of thumb, and applied to many areas of life: 80% of results are usually achieved through 20% of our activities; 80% of a firm’s sales come from 20% of its customers; etc.

So what does that have to do with niche journalism? Simply put, it means that by being a niche journalist, you can leverage the knowledge of others to rapidly expand your online business. By focusing 20% of your efforts on curating the knowledge of experts, practitioners, “survivors”, and others, you can have a disproportionately larger impact on your online business.

How I’ve Used Niche Journalism to Leverage the Expertise of Others

As I’ve mentioned in other places (like my posts on the Clickbank blog), early in my online life I developed an information product for farmers, and more recently have focused on the niche audience of overweight, middle-aged males. I chose the latter niche audience because it has a large range of health problems, and as the Baby Boomer bulge gets older, this audience will grow even larger in size.

Now, I’ve developed a number of health-related information products for this niche, but I’m neither a medical professional, nor am I even a middle-aged male!

(I’m 42, which to me is technically “middle aged”, because it is – I hope – the mid-point of how long I’m going to live. But for some reason many definitions of middle-age start from 45 years old. Anyhoo…)

Despite not being a member of my target niche audience (nor an expert on their problems), I’ve still managed to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of info products to that target this group.

How?

By finding out the problems that overweight, middle-aged men have, and acting as a journalist to track down solutions to those problems.

In the process of tracking down solutions, I’ve done these things (among others):

• Interviewed experts
• Interviewed “survivors”
• Snooped around blogs and online forums

(I should note that I’ve also outsourced these tasks – and at a very reasonable price, too!)

This approach has allowed me to grow a thriving online business that has multiple income streams. And I’ve achieved it through a simple formula:

Niche research + niche journalism = nice profits!

But I’m not the only one who follows this formula. Here are a few examples of other online businesses that are thriving by using it:

IncomeDiary.com, a blog on how to make money online. This is a great example of niche journalism, as the blog’s owner (Michael Dunlop) freely admits that he knew nothing about the topic when started.

But he managed to build a large following by interviewing experts in the field of online business. In the process, his knowledge of, and authority in, that field has grown substantially.

On other popular blogs like Entrepreneur’s Journey and Smart Passive Incomethere are podcasts in which the blogger interviews experts on a range of topics related to internet marketing. This has two benefits:

1. The interviewer gains a lot of knowledge from the person they’re interviewing
2. The interviewer also becomes thought of as an expert-by-association, simply by doing the interview!

How YOU Can Become a Niche Journalist

Before you can become a niche journalist, you first have to find a niche that is both profitable AND fun, of course.

But once you’ve settled on a niche, there are MANY ways you can “borrow” the expertise necessary to create information products, content for your website, etc. Here are some ideas to get you started (I’ve personally used all of these):

• Interview “experts” (university professors, consultants, and/or people with decades of experience)
• Interview “survivors” (i.e. people who have overcome some ordeal and have lessons to share)
• Partner with experts
• Have content written for you by experts
• License content/products from experts
• Collect and summarize content yourself (as one example, this approach has led Peep Laja from ConversionXL to quickly be seen as an expert in his field and build a million dollar consulting business)

Summing Up

In this post I’ve tried to dispel the myth that you have to be an “expert” or “authority” in order to start (and grow) an online business.

From my own experience, and the experience of many other Internet marketers, it’s not necessary to be an expert to serve an audience. People will gladly buy from you, as long as you clearly understand their needs, and put on your niche journalist hat to track down the solutions that will meet those needs.

Find Fans’ and Followers’ Pain Points in 5 Simple Steps : @ProBlogger

Find Fans’ and Followers’ Pain Points in 5 Simple Steps

Filed Under: Social Media

This guest post is by AJ Kumar of Single Grain.

Social media sites are great for a number of different purposes, including connecting with your readership and establishing yourself as a thought leader within your industry. However, the interactions you have on these popular social sites can also serve another major purpose within your business—providing the market research necessary to uncover your audience’s hidden pain points.

But what are pain points, and what makes these issues so useful from a marketing standpoint?

Essentially, “pain points” are the problems that members of your audience have that they’re actively seeking solutions for. Let’s take a closer look at different parts of this statement to see what makes pain points so powerful:

• The problems: When you can identify different issues that your audience is facing, you can also identify and provide the solutions they need. Doing so will increase both your reputation within your niche and your ability to market products that resolve these issues.
• That members of your audience have: As a blogger, you’re only one member of your community, which makes it easy to assume that your audience members are experiencing the problems you expect them to have. Unfortunately, limiting your survey of potential pain points to your own assumptions means that you could miss some tremendous opportunities to connect with your readers over problems you never even imagined they’d be facing!
• That they’re actively seeking solutions for: Problem-solving is a continuum, which means that people need to acknowledge that they have certain problems and actively seek out a solution before your interventions can be useful.  Approaching readers at the wrong point on this spectrum—for example, before they even know they have problems—can make your marketing efforts less successful.

With all of these different factors in mind, here’s a simple five-step process for uncovering your audience’s hidden pain points and using these problems to connect more effectively through better-targeted blog posts and paid products.

1. Find your audience

Clearly, in order to identify the pain points your audience is expressing on popular social networking sites, you first need to locate your readers!

Now, I’m not just talking about high-tailing it over to Facebook or Twitter, finding a few token users and setting up your pain points marketing plan based on the presence of a few audience members. Instead, what you want to find is the social website where people are actively pouring out their innermost feelings to fellow members of their communities.

Within your niche, this might be Facebook or Twitter—or it might be a forum, message board, or chat site.  Don’t limit the potential of your market research by observing only surface-level interactions or assuming that the top-tier social networking sites will be the best places to understand your members’ inner pain points.

The easiest way to identify your audience’s internet hangouts is to pretend to be an audience member yourself.  Enter questions into Google as if you were searching for the types of information your site visitors are looking for and pay attention to the sites that appear in the natural search results.  Explore these sites and follow any external links you encounter, paying close attention to signs of high engagement (for example, post comments, forum thread views, and social shares).

Once you find the hottest social sites in your niche, take the time to set up a profile for yourself and begin interacting with your audience.

2. Find the keywords they use

As you engage with your potential site visitors on your chosen social networking sites, pay special attention to the way they’re asking questions and the keywords they use to do so.

One of the biggest weaknesses facing bloggers who incorporate traditional keyword research into their website marketing plans is that the data found in these number-crunching programs often fails to tell the whole story about your audience’s actual interests and desires. The result is a blog that’s well-optimized for the search engine spiders, but not your actual readers!

For example, suppose you run a blog in the weight loss industry, and your keyword research turns up good search volume and low competition for the phrase, “easy tips for fat loss.”  However, if your audience rarely uses the phrase “fat loss”—instead, preferring the words “weight loss”—you could be missing a golden opportunity to target your audience’s pain points by failing to optimize your blog for the appropriate words and phrases.

3. Search social media sites for questions and issues

In addition to using social networking sites to uncover potential keyword optimization ideas, you can also search the content that’s been posted to your social-site-of-choice in order to uncover your audience’s most pressing issues.

Continuing with our weight loss blog example mentioned earlier, suppose you determine that one of the best social sites in your niche from a market research perspective is 3fatchicks.com—a popular health and fitness forum site primarily targeting women.  Entering the phrase “help me” (a good signifier of the issues people are actually facing) into the site’s search tool returns the following set of results:

Many of the threads listed here provide great insight into the pain points your audience is currently experiencing—any of which could be turned into future blog posts or paid products.  As an example, the forum post titled, “help me stop being so addicted to chocolate!!!” could easily be transformed into a “17 Ways to Beat Your Chocolate Addiction” report that you can practically guarantee will appeal to members of your target niche.

4. Ask your audience questions

If you’re having trouble identifying social networking site posts that reveal your audience’s pain points, you can also go directly to the source and gather data by asking your audience leading questions.

For example, consider the following sample questions:

• What has been your greatest achievement to date?
• What invention would help you most right now?
• What one thing would you like to give up forever?
• What would you do right now if you were handed $1,000?
• If you could change any one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Just a word of caution, though: for best results, it’s best to use this technique only after you’ve already established yourself as a valuable member of your social networking community. Attempting to ask leading questions when you’ve just joined a new online community can result in either a serious lack of responses or the perception that you’re scamming your chosen social networking site.

5. Develop blog posts and info products based on stated issues

By following the steps above, you should have uncovered a wealth of information about your audience’s hidden pain points that can be directly transformed into effective blog posts and paid products.

However, keep in mind that market research on your audience’s issues should be an ongoing part of your blog’s promotional plan.  Changes occur in every industry, whether in terms of new websites launching, new technologies being released or any other type of innovation, which means that the problems your audience faces will change as well.

For best results, check in with this process frequently and pay attention to the reaction you get to the posts and products you release targeting the pain points you’ve uncovered.  Use this insights to tweak your future launches, and—over time—the insight you gain into your audience’s hidden motivations will make you a far better blogger and a much more respected member of your community.

10 Steps to Developing A Niche Following on Google Plus | Viralheat

10 Steps to Developing A Niche Following on Google Plus

Posted April 17th, 2013 by Amanda_Blain & filed under Google+, Social Media

Amanda_Blain

 April 17, 2013

Tags:  

google plus

Category:  

Google+, Social Media

Do you want to get a head start on the untapped market of Google Plus for your business?

Google Plus has an audience of more than 500 million users, and uses what you share on it to impact your companies search results. It’s not rocket science to see that you should be a part of what’s going on sooner rather than later.

Here are 10 Steps to get the jump ahead of your competition and get a following on Google Plus:

Create targeted niche circles based on your industry.

1. Define Your Niche Target Market – One of the best ways to use Google Plus is to develop targeted communities about topics in your industry and then become an industry leader on those topics. What do you want to be known for? Which topics relate to your business in a grand sense and then keyword specific?

For example –  a mommy blogger who posts fitness, food and parenting tips on her blog could come up with some specific keywords like – cupcakes, foodies, running, fitness, yoga, bullying, parenting, wine, education. These niche keyword topics will become your circles.

Search by keywords and add people who post about that topic to your circles selectively.

2. Search and Circle –  Go to the search bar at the top of Google Plus and type in one of the keywords you selected above. Start scrolling through the results. People will already be posting about those topics. Scan the posts and selectively add those people you find interesting and relevant, to an appropriately named circle. Many will be brand pages (shown with a Square symbol beside the name). You can add brand pages, but you should focus your efforts on people. People are what makes this community.  You should also add any communities that you come across and have a look at people posting in them.  This recently launched community feature is another great way to target and add people to your circles.

An example of the business page square symbol. Focus on people, not brands.

3. Do This For All Circles – Repeat this idea for several keywords in your niche, creating several targeted interest based circles. Circle 500 people. More is better. Take some time with this. Remember this will be an ongoing work in progress. Don’t do it all in one sitting. Your Twitter following, Facebook fan page and Linkedin connections were not built in one day and your Google Plus will not be either.

4. The 80 – 20 Rule – Now that you have some circles… How do you develop those communities? Many people miss this key step. You need to be interacting (80% of the time) much more than broadcasting (posting content 20% of the time). Especially when just starting out. To get the best interaction on your own posts you’ll need to appear on other people’s Google Plus radar. One of the fastest ways to do that, is to interact with them on their own posts first. Remember no one wants to be sold to 24 hours a day.

5. Interaction is Key –  Make meaningful, value added comments on any posts you find interesting. Reshare posts that are in your niche topics. Make sure you add a few lines of your own opinions to the post when you reshare it. Bring people whom you have interacted with into the conversation by using a simple “+Amanda Blain have you tried this wine?”  Also remember to +1 people who comment on your posts, as a ‘thank you’. All these simple, easy steps work great for developing your community.

6. Eight Out of Ten Posts  -  Not About You –  For every ten posts you make on Google Plus,  roughly eight should be posts that are interest based content that does not promote you directly. This means you should not post your blog, website, or whatever you are selling. Talking about you all the time does not work in a real life conversation, and it doesn’t work on Google Plus.  Develop a community. Don’t spam your audience – instead post a picture of tasty looking cupcakes, share a bullying news article including your thoughts about it, or ask that question about Hot Yoga that you always were curious about but never asked.

7. Two Out Of Ten Posts –  All About You – Blog posts, YouTube, your website products – Here is where you get the chance to self promote. Try again to not make it a sales pitch, but include a story relevant to the audience you have built in your topics. If you’ve been cultivating a cupcake circle, this would be your chance to post your OWN recent cupcake creation. Why do all this for 2 posts? The Google+ secret is – People will go to your website anyway.  If you have your website linked in your “About” section people will visit it WITHOUT you telling them too.

Your profile is your sales page - take time to make it detailed and sell you.

8. Profile Profile Profile – When you do something interesting – a great comment, intriguing post or simply by circling someone – people tend to have a look at your “About” page. This page is your virtual face to the world and you never get a second chance to make that first impression. Make sure your “About” section is filled out completely. THIS PAGE is your sales page. Have a lovely photo of yourself. Make sure you link to all your webpages, sites you contribute to and also link to the important websites in the text portion of your “About” section. Make it sparkle and shine and make sure it has all the keywords that you are trying to become a thought leader on.

9. Post Now, Post Often – Keep it fun, fresh and interesting. Stay in people’s minds by posting daily. If you can, several short posts a day works wonders. Use pictures, hashtags and a wide range of content (links, videos, pictures, and text) to get the best results. Make time to add it to your daily social media strategy. Posting once every 2 weeks is a sure way to be forgotten.

10. Lather, Rinse, Repeat – Some of the people you add from this will circle you back. Even more will add you as you continue to interact. These circles allow you to create micro-communities that you can hangout, share to, even notify about specific posts making it worth your time to create them. You should repeat these 10 steps often. Find new people to circle and clean out old ones. Interact. Post targeted, relevant content. Repeat.

What about Brand Pages? All of the previous steps are for someone who is using their personal Google Plus page to mix their business and personal social media usage. You can also use this same technique to push communities to a brand page as your “2 self promotion posts”.  Try and think outside the box of different ways to talk about your product, without selling. If you are Starbucks show some latte coffee art, daily facts about coffee, pictures of the coffee growing process, NOT Todays specials, latest coffee blend, and the holiday gift basket bundles.

Final Thoughts – Google Plus is a large, rapidly growing community of passionate, interest based people who click links, fund kickstarters and share content – they will stick with you as long as you provide value. You just need to take some time to find your audience.

How do you use Google Plus? Do you find yourself self promoting more than recommended in this article? Comment here with your thoughts or questions about using Google Plus for business.

Amanda Blain is CEO of Girlfriend Social (a friendship social network for women), Geek Girl, Zombie Fan, Speaker, and Consultant to companies looking for assistance with their social media presence.http://www.amandablain.com

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How to Write a Blog Post: A Simple Formula + 5 Free Blog Post Templates

December 31, 2014 // 8:00 AM

How to Write a Blog Post: A Simple Formula + 5 Free Blog Post Templates

Written by Rachel Sprung | @rsprung

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You've probably heard how paramount blogging is to the success of your marketing. Without it, your SEO will tank, you'll have nothing to promote in social media, you'll have no clout with your leads and customers, and you'll have fewer pages to put those oh-so-valuable calls-to-action that generate inbound leads. Need I say more?

So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can't consistently blog? Maybe because, unless you're one of the few people who actually like writing, business blogging kind of stinks. You have to find words, string them together into sentences, and ughhh where do you even start?

Well my friend, the time for excuses is over. After you read this post, there will be absolutely no reason you can't blog every single day -- and do it quickly. Not only am I about to provide you with a simple blogging formula to follow, but I'm also going to give you free templates for creating five different types of blog posts:

1. The How-To Post
2. The List-Based Post
3. The Curated Collection Post
4. The SlideShare Presentation Post
5. The Newsjacking Post

Click here to download our free blog post templates and learn how to write 5 different blog posts.

With all this blogging how-to, literally anyone can blog as long as they truly know the subject matter they're writing about. And since you're an expert in your industry, there's no longer any reason you can't sit down every day and hammer out an excellent blog post.

Writing a Blog Post: A Simple Formula to Follow

1) Understand your audience.

Before you start to write, have a clear understanding of your target audience. What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them? This is where creating your buyer personas comes in handy. Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests while you're coming up with a topic for your blog post.

For instance, if your readers are Millennials looking to start their own business, you probably don't need to provide them with information about getting started in social media -- most of them already have that down. You might, however, want to give them information about how to adjust their approach to social media from a more casual, personal one to a more business-savvy, networking-focused approach. That kind of tweak is what separates you from blogging about generic stuff to the stuff your audience really wants (and needs) to hear.

2) Start with a topic and working title.

Before you even write anything, you need to pick a topic for your blog post. The topic can be pretty general to start with. For example, if you're a plumber, you might start out thinking you want to write about leaky faucets. Then you might come up with a few different working titles -- in other words, iterations or different ways of approaching that topic to help you focus your writing.  For example, you might decide to narrow your topic to "Tools for Fixing Leaky Faucets" or "Common Causes of Leaky Faucets." A working title is specific and will guide your post so you can start writing.

Let's take a real post as an example: "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post." Appropriate, right? The topic, in this case, was probably simply "blogging." Then the working title may have been something like, "The Process for Selecting a Blog Post Topic." And the final title ended up being "How to Choose a Solid Topic for Your Next Blog Post."

See that evolution from topic, to working title, to final title? Even though the working title may not end up being the final title (more on that in a moment), it still provides enough information so you can focus your blog post on something more specific than a generic, overwhelming topic.

3) Write an intro (and make it captivating).

We've written more specifically about writing captivating introductions in the post, "How to Write an Introduction [Quick Tip]," but let's review, shall we?

First, grab the reader's attention. If you lose the reader in the first few paragraphs -- or even sentences -- of the introduction, they will stop reading even before they've given your post a fair shake. You can do this in a number of ways: tell a story or a joke, be empathetic, or grip the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.

Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives. 

4) Organize your content.

Sometimes, blog posts can have an overwhelming amount of information -- for the readerand the writer. The trick is to organize the info so readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. The organization can take multiple forms -- sections, lists, tips, whatever's most appropriate. But it must be organized!

Let's take a look at the post, "Productivity Tools and Techniques to Stop Wasting Away Your Workday." There is a lot of content in this post, so we broke it into four main sections using headers -- Checking Email; Blocking Distractions; Sourcing Content; and Meetings, Collaboration, and Brainstorming. The sections are then separated into sub-sections that to go into more detail and also make the content easier to read and less intimidating using sub-headers.

To complete this step, all you really need to do is outline your post. That way, before you start writing, you know which points you want to cover, and the best order in which to do it. To make things even easier, you can also download and use our free blog post templates, which are pre-organized for five of the most common blog post types. Just fill in the blanks! 

5) Write!

The next step -- but not the last -- is actually writing the content. We couldn't forget about that, of course.

Now that you have your outline/template, you're ready to fill in the blanks. Use your outline as a guide and be sure to expand on all of your points as needed. Write about what you already know, and if necessary, do additional research to gather more information, examples, and data to back up your points, providing proper attribution when incorporating external sources. 

Don't worry about the length of your post. Like my high school teachers used to say, "just make it as long as it needs to be" to be high quality and helpful.

6) Edit/proofread your post, and fix your formatting.

You're not quite done yet, but you're close! The editing process is an important part of blogging -- don't overlook it. Ask a grammar-conscious co-worker to copyedit and proofread your post, and consider enlisting the help of The Ultimate Editing Checklist. Then check your formatting for the following ...

Featured Image 

Make sure you choose a visually appealing and relevant image for your post. As social networks treat content with images more prominently, visuals are now more responsible than ever for the sucess of your blog content in social media. And with data showing emails with images are preferred to those without, including images is also extremely important for the emails you send to your blog subscribers.

For help selecting an image for your post, read "How to Select the Perfect Image for Your Next Blog Post" -- and pay close attention to the section about copyright law.

Visual Appearance

No one likes an ugly blog post. And it's not just pictures that make a post visually appealing -- it's the formatting and organization of the post, too. 

In a properly formatted and visually appealing blog post, you'll notice that headers and sub-headers are used to break up large blocks of text -- and those headers are styled consistently. Screenshots always have a similar, defined border so they don't appear as if they're floating in space. The style stays consistent from post to post. Maintaining this consistency makes your content (and your brand) look more professional, and makes it easier on the eyes.

Topics/Tags

Tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post. They also allow readers to browse for more content in the same category on your blog. Refrain from adding a laundry list of tags to each post. Instead, put some thought into a tagging strategy. Think of tags as "topics" or "categories," and choose 10-20 tags that represent all the main topics you want to cover on your blog. Then stick to those. 

7) Insert a call-to-action (CTA) at the end.

At the end of every blog post, you should have a CTA that indicates what you want the reader to do next -- subscribe to your blog, download an ebook, register for a webinar or event, read a related article, etc. Typically, you think about the CTA being beneficial for the marketer. Your visitors read your blog post, they click on the CTA, and eventually you generate a lead. But the CTA is also a valuable resource for the person reading your content -- use your CTAs to offer more content similar to the subject of the post they just finished reading.

In the blog post, "How to Strategically Promote SlideShare Presentations on Your Blog," for instance, readers are given tactical ways to promote their SlideShare presentations on their blog. At the end of the post is a CTA referring readers to download a PowerPoint template for SlideShare presentations.

See how that's a win-win for everyone? Readers who want to learn more have the opportunity to do so, and the business receives a lead they can nurture ... who may even become a customer! Learn more about how to choose the right CTA for every blog post in this article.

8) Optimize for on-page SEO.

After you finish writing, go back and optimize your post for search.

Don't obsess over how many keywords to include. If there are opportunities to incorporate keywords you're targeting, and it won't impact reader experience, do it. If you can make your URL shorter and more keyword-friendly, go for it. But don't cram keywords or shoot for some arbitrary keyword density -- Google's smarter than that!

Here's a little reminder of what you can and should look for, but if you want a really detailed explanation, I suggest you read this blog post:

Meta Description

Meta descriptions are the descriptions below the post's page title on Google's search results pages. They provide searchers with a short summary of the post before clicking into it. They are ideally between 150-160 characters and start with a verb, such as "Learn," "Read," or "Discover." While meta descriptions no longer factor into Google's keyword ranking algorithm, they do give searchers a snapshot of what they will get by reading the post and can help improve your clickthrough rate from search.

Page Title and Headers

Most blogging software uses your post title as your page title, which is the most important on-page SEO element at your disposal. But if you've followed our formula so far, you should already have a working title that will naturally include keywords/phrases your target audience is interested in. Don't over-complicate your title by trying to fit keywords where they don't naturally belong. That said, if there are clear opportunities to add keywords you're targeting to your post title and headers, feel free to take them. Also, try to keep your headlines short -- ideally, under 65 characters -- so they don't get truncated in search engine results.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the word or words that link to another page -- either on your website or on another website. Carefully select which keywords you want to link to other pages on your site, because search engines take that into consideration when ranking your page for certain keywords.

It's also important to consider which pages you link to. Consider linking to pages that you want to rank well for that keyword. You could end up getting it to rank on Google's first page of results instead of its second page, and that ain't small potatoes.

Mobile Optimization

Having a website that is responsive or designed for mobile has become more and more critical. According to a report by Google, "What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today,"74% of users say they're also more likely to return to a site in the future if it's mobile-friendly. As a result of information like this and other similar statistics, Google is now prioritizing websites that are optimized for mobile. 

Learn more about effective mobile optimization in this free mobile marketing guide.

9) Pick a catchy title.

Last but not least, it's time to spruce up that working title of yours. Luckily, we have a simple formula for writing catchy titles that will grab the attention of your reader. Here's what to consider:

1. Start with your working title.
2. As you start to edit your title, keep in mind that it's important to keep the title accurate and clear.
3. Then, work on making your title sexy -- whether it's through strong language, alliteration, or another literary tactic.
4. If you can, optimize for SEO by sneaking some keywords in there (only if it's natural, though!).
5. Finally, see if you can shorten it at all. No one likes a long, overwhelming title -- and remember, Google prefers 65 characters or fewer before it truncates it on its search engine results pages.

If you've mastered the steps above, learn about some way to take your blog posts to the next level in this post. What other steps do you take to refine your blog posts? Don't forget todownload your five free blog post templates right here.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in 2013 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.