Planning a Great Blog

Blog posts are an excellent way to drive traffic to your site and to showcase your brand, your talents and your services. Not only can blog posts shed some light on what you have to offer your clients, but they can be used as a great way to create passive income. Although we all know how necessary blogs can be for our business the unfortunate truth is the most of us don’t really enjoy writing them, planning them, finding graphics, sharing them, etc. So, what can we do to make blogging a little less painful and a lot more enjoyable? I’m going to share that with you today!

Create a Plan! Block out 30 minutes on your planning calendar once a month to brainstorm blog post ideas. What do you want to write about? What pertains to your clients, your brand and what you love to do as an interior designer? You need to know your ideal client well enough to know what they like and what they’d enjoy reading about. Start writing down topics. For example, you could write about color, specific pieces of furniture (tulip tables, sectionals, x-benches), mixed metals, powder rooms, maximizing visual space with design, etc. Gather ideas from your favorite magazines and websites.

Once you have a great list of topics, schedule a couple of hours once a week to research and write. Since you already have your list of topics, choose one, do some quick research and then write. Your blog posts don’t have to be novel size, 500 words is just fine. It’s best to write short engaging copy, then long rambling copy. Be sure to include your personality in your post, people get to know you as they read your writing and the ones that are entertained or educated continue to come back for more.

Once your copy is written, come up with a great title for your post. For example, Why Are X-Benches So Popular?, Sectionals vs. Sofas, Most Popular Paint Colors for 2019, The Most Attractive Way to Mix Metals. Okay, you get my point.

Now you have a title and copy – next is gathering some graphics. Search your own library of photos and your portfolio first, if you don’t have anything then try a free graphics site for photos to include in your blog post. You can try pixabay.com, unsplash.com, picmonkey.com, or picjumbo.com for free photos.

Once you have your title, copy and images you can reread your copy – out loud to make sure you caught all the spelling and grammatical errors and then either hit publish or schedule it to be published at a later date. Once it’s published be sure to share it on all your social media platforms.

When you plan time in your calendar to do these things and to do them consistently it gets easier and easier each week, especially when you know what you want to write about. To further my organization, I assign a topic to each post in my calendar so when I go to write I’m not even looking at my list of topics because I’ve already chosen a topic and placed it in my calendar for that day.

I plan by blog posts out 6-8 weeks in advance to ensure that I’m staying consistent with my posting.

This doesn’t sound so bad does it? If all else fails call me. My virtual design assistants write blog copy and manage social media all the time. We understand that you enjoy creating spaces and we enjoy creating content and a following for our clients.

For more information on our services, please check out the website at www.elitedesignassistants.com.

Happy Writing! Danae