Having a regularly updated blog is a great way to promote your accounting firm. Blogs keep your website up-to-date, enable you to help your clients and leads solve their problems, and highlight your expertise.
Here are 8 steps to writing a blog of your own.
Your blog should provide value to your readers, so you want to focus on their needs. When coming up with topics, look to your target audience to find out what they need to know about. Potential inspiration for blog posts could come from:
Types of blog posts include:
Lists: 5 ways to save more at tax time
Curated collections: 5 CRM systems that help you effectively run your small business
News pieces: 5 ways changes to tax laws affect your small business
Explanatory: The differences between an accountant and a bookkeeper and why you need them
Once you have a selection of blogs posted, review them to see which have performed the best. Those topics may have resonated most with your audience, so see if you can replicate those topics. Understanding your buyer personas will help you craft posts that resonate more effectively with your readers.
Some people feel the need to outline every paragraph, and that’s okay if you’re in that group. While you don’t need to write an in-depth outline, a short outline that states what the topic is, why it’s important, and what you most want people to know about it will help you stay on track.
As an added benefit, if you write the outline and come up with lots of ideas for the blog post, you can jot them down for a follow-up post.
Whether you work best writing from the start to the end or you prefer to write the introduction last is up to you. Play around with different methods to figure out how you work best. No matter how you work best, there are some things to keep in mind:
In truth, this step can come before or after you’ve written your blog post. It all depends on how you work best. If you write it first, however, revisit it after the post is written to ensure it still reflects the content.
Your title needs to be engaging and eye-catching. The best titles show your audience immediately how reading the post will impact them–or how your post relates to them.
For example, “5 changes to tax law” might attract people who are interested in tax laws, but probably not too many others. But “How your finances are affected by recent changes to the tax laws” will resonate with people, who will wonder how their finances are affected. This title also gives you a means to make the topic relevant to your audience because you’re talking about them specifically, not just about changes to the tax laws generally.
Once your blog post is written, take the time to edit it. You’ll want to watch out for awkward sentences, phrases that don’t make sense, and typos. For the best results, do the following:
Once you’ve got your blog post up, make sure you promote it. Share it on your social media, send links in your newsletter, and consider guest blogging for others so you can promote your work.
The best way to improve on what you’ve been doing is to review your results. Go over your results and compare them to your goals. If your goal was to increase the number of leads, have your blog posts done that? If you wanted more subscribers, are you getting more?
Now that you know what works, make sure you update your blog on a regular basis.