 Well hello and welcome to today's video. Now if you watched my previous video which was three reasons why you should consider blogging as an art marketing strategy then you'll be super excited to know that this one is all about exactly how to structure and write a great blog article for your website. So if you're ready to find out exactly how to structure your perfect blog article then this video is for you. I'm going to walk you through seven simple steps to putting together and writing your own blog article that's going to be brilliant for your artist's website. And stay right to the end too because I'm going to share some great tips for formatting your article that will make the difference between somebody staying and reading your article and perhaps jumping off it and looking for something else altogether. So you don't want to put all that hard work into writing a beautiful article if nobody's going to read it right so you're going to want to stay to the end and make sure to grab those tips. Hello and welcome or welcome back to my channel. My name is Sophie and I help artists just like you to set up market and grow a highly successful art business doing what you love. And if you'd like to learn more tips and tricks on how to grow that successful art business then you're in the right place. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and hit the bell to get notified every time I post a new video. Alright let's walk through those seven steps for constructing a good quality easy to read perfect for your audience blog. Okay so number one let's do some research we're going to research your blog topic. Now you might say to me Sophie I'm going to be writing about my story why do I need to research the topic but I want to say to you you might be writing about your story and very often this is what happens somebody writes a lovely long blog article telling a particular phase in their journey and then the title either doesn't really reflect the content or doesn't really make any sense or worst case scenario is not using what we call keywords that somebody's actually looking for. So you want to explore your topic a little bit in something like Google you can also use other search platforms like YouTube or Pinterest or Amazon if that's relevant for you. If you have a little knowledge for using keyword research tools like the keyword planner that's free you can use that as well. You basically want to find out a series of words a phrase that somebody from your audience might be putting into Google or any other search engine in order to find your content. So what you don't want to do like I say is write a lovely blog article and give it a title that doesn't reflect what's in the blog and isn't searched for. So you want to kind of have a look you plug it in to say Google for example have a look at the results are the other articles being written on that topic and do the articles reflect what you're going to do. Could you find a different angle on what's there already or does the results bring up nothing at all and that for me would be more concerning. I want to make sure that you're going to write a blog article around a topic that somebody is already searching for. So you're going to do that bit of research have a look come up with some ideas try putting different words into Google that might give you different results. You might go Oh actually that's sort of similar to what I want to write about. But this person doesn't do it from this angle or doesn't mention the things I want to mention. Great. I've got a new fresh angle on that topic and it will have given you some ideas on titles as well. Now we want to make sure here that you're not going to be copying content and you're not going to be copying a title. That's really really important. All you're doing is doing the research so that you can be better informed of what's already out there. That's what people are liking searching for already. You might find a topic that's a video that's got a million views. Then you know God wow this is a topic that people really really really want to know about. Right. Or you might find the topic is not you don't get any results the topic you wanted to write about. So you want to make sure that there's enough people interested in your topic. All right. Number two. So having done your research are now going to formulate a title for your blog. So you take that research and you put it into a title. Now here's the thing about titles. It needs to make sense. It needs to reflect what you're talking about and you want to avoid long ambiguous complicated titles that maybe take two lines to write. You know if you're teaching sort of topics the way I am then three ways to the key the six keys to this that and the other the five steps to something right something that people can easily follow. If it's a journey my journey painting from I don't know from from Italy to Spain or something that people are going oh okay I know what's going to be in that right you want to be very clear with your title. So step number three now you've done all the hard work really you want to actually get down to writing the draft content for your blog. So you want to think about what are the key points that you want to cover. You could write these down in bullet notes. Okay I want to talk about this this this and this and then you want to do something like think about your blog article in three parts. The beginning where you're going to introduce your topic and kind of get that hook as to why somebody would want to read. You're going to kind of excite them about what you're going to talk about. The middle bit where you are going to then flesh out the bullets. These are the key things I want to talk about. You're going to flesh them out and then the conclusion and of course really importantly their next steps. I like to use a simple word doc just dump all the ideas down and just get writing. Other tools you can use of course is put a timer on. I quite often if I'm going to write a blog which I haven't done in a while but there was a time we were writing lots and lots of blogs. I would go to a cafe nice environment nice cup of coffee timer on for 90 minutes and I would just get to it and write the draft content. Step number four you want to create what we call sub headers. Now I don't know about you but I am definitely what's called a skim reader. So I will search for topic. I'll find a blog that I want to read and instead of starting from the top and reading every word I skim down looking for the bulleted large writing you know any key things that stand out. And if I'm interested in those then I might go back and read the whole blog article or I might read a section of it. So you want to go through the content that you've written in draft and think about the skim readers. What are the clear like a header for a paragraph. What's a key point you're talking about. And then you could just bulb those or make them larger on your draft copy. And you know that these are going to be the sub headers that you're going to actually alter when you put into your website. So you just make them bigger on your draft and then you want to make sure that if somebody only skim read your sub headers they make sense right. They just kind of they flow from one to the other to and or ultimately of course really are going to excite somebody to want to read that paragraph that's below. Or what's that bit about I want to go in and read it. So that's really really important part to do as well. Number five is creating your calls to action. So not only do you of course want to write a fabulous blog article and then use all those tips I gave in the previous video for actually repurposing the content out into social media. But you want to make sure that somebody has the opportunity to take action at the end of the blog article as well. So think to yourself what do you want them to do next. Do you want them to read another article in which case you're going to link them on to another blog and another blog and another blog. Do you want them to go watch a video about the topic perhaps here on YouTube. Do you want them to sign up to your newsletter to your email mailing list. Do you want them to do that. Have you got a freebie download that you would like to send them to to get that. Or would you like them to give them a special offer code to go to your shop and buy something off the website. Whatever it is provide a clear call to action in you can do that in a few places if the article is long but definitely at the bottom. Love this article. Here's what to do next because people like to be told that they read an article it's like I really enjoyed that. Now what. Well here's another blog article you might like. Here's the video you might like or here's a download that's particularly pertinent to this blog. So you want to be thinking all the time what's the customer going to do next. So one of the magical things you can do blogging just like you can on YouTube is you can actually link to other blogs all the time. So what I would do on my on my copy on my word copy is I would already be aware of the other blogs I've written. You can keep them on a spreadsheet just to remind yourself. Then as you go through the copy you can think oh wait a minute I've got another article on landscape painting that I wrote. So you bold that for yourself to remind yourself that when you put and upload the content into your website you're going to use that bolded text as a link to that other article. So if somebody is reading down and they think oh there's a link to I can learn more about landscape I'll come back to that in a minute or there's a link over here to another article going deeper into this thing. So ultimately you want to create as many links as possible because you want to keep people reading on your website. Step number seven of course it's completing the blog. So now you've done all those bits and pieces you want to pull it all together. You want to go through look for any spell checks grammar or anything you've repeated a few times. You want to make sure that your keyword is through your article as well. Again I like to use a timer to stay on track because I don't want to wander off and find that three hours has gone by and I'm still looking at the detail. I keep moving yourself forward. You know we don't need to strive for perfection in everything we do. So long as it's good enough and it hasn't got any core basic mistakes in it you know let's get the article published. How many words should you be doing in an article at least 500 maybe over a thousand is better 1500 is good and then of course if you want to do a really bigger blog you know maybe you have one core topic that's your thing that's your niche you could write a really massive sort of two and a half to five thousand word blog and that would be something you would send people to all the time and of course it would link off to other things as well. Could be one of your key marketing strategies. So once you've done that so you upload it onto your website add in images do the links to all the formatting etc and get ready to publish. But before you do that I promised you some key tips to be following and thinking about before you hit the publish button so let's go ahead and do those. Alright so I call these my top tips for legibility. Number one make sure that you use clear bullets because there's nothing like a short bullet makes it easier for people to just read. What you want to do is avoid big paragraphs. A paragraph should really only be sort of four lines deep because I don't know about you but I find those really difficult to read I don't really want to read long paragraph and I'm going back into skin mode. So short paragraphs use bullets use bold to emphasize things use italics if you've got a quote and maybe just a bit of blank space around that so it pops out. Ensure that your text is left aligned don't do any sort of fancy sort of aligning just keep it clear and easy to read. Make sure the font size is large enough 16 18 point I like to do a blog in because you know you don't know where people are reading on their phone their iPad on the computer if it's written in tiny font people are never going to read it and again avoid colors avoid a fancy artistic font that looks great but it's completely illegible just use the bog standard fonts nice good size plenty of white space in around the blog so that you can go skim down it and read it really easily use little images of course to illustrate things so you can break up your blog with nice illustrations and pictures makes it again very nice to read check for sentence flow now you've uploaded it make sure that it all just goes down very very nicely and you haven't got an awkward paragraph that doesn't make sense in which case get rid of it then lastly ask yourself can you skim so where you had your sub headers you want to make sure that they are headers when you are doing the formatting so now you can practice you can pretend to be the skim reader you zoom back down the article just looking at the sub headers do they make sense can you just skim down there and read it easily if it's a yes it's a big tick for you so I hope you've really enjoyed this video and you're really super inspired to get blogging now I promise you although it might seem like a medium to long burn strategy it's well worth it if you haven't already make sure to watch my other videos on blogging and of course marketing your art business as well thank you so much for watching if you've loved the video don't forget to give me a thumbs up and I'll see you on another one