By: Kayla Anderson for Nevada SEO Experts

Creating a blog for your business and updating it regularly is a great way to get exposure and drive traffic to your website. No matter what you’re selling, you want to gain your prospects/customers’ trust by proving that you’re the expert in your field.

Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes…if you had a problem, where would you go to find a solution? You may ask your friends, but many people go to the internet to get some advice. (According to Internet Live Stats, there were more than 5 billion Google searches in one day alone. Watching the ticker, I noticed 100,000 searches per second.)

As a business owner, you want to be the one who stands out from your competitors by providing the solution. Plus, updating your blog regularly boosts your search engine optimization and ranking because you are adding new web pages to your site (essentially creating new ways for people to find you). Also, your competitors probably already have a blog as more and more people are realizing the ROI that inbound marketing brings them.

Getting started is the hardest part, but once you get a draft down then refining it to the point of publication is much easier. So once you’ve decided to add a blog to your website, here are some ways to get your creative juices flowing.

First, ask yourself these questions:

1. What do you personally like to read about?
2. What are the questions that your customers ask you throughout the day?
3. What do you wish people knew about your industry or business?
4. What are your competitors talking about?

Write down your answers in how they relate to your business- this will help provide a framework for your posts. Here are some other ways to generate ideas:

5. Check out what people are talking about on Quora
6. Find the most shared content on BuzzSumo
7. Look at your competitors’ websites
8. Pay attention to what’s going on around you and if you get an idea, then write it down
9. Subscribe to your own favorite blogs (or at least bookmark them)
10. Put a call out on social media for post requests
11. Do a keyword search to see what people in your industry are looking for

And as you write your blog post, remember to keep these tips in mind:

12. Write educational content
13. Write about your industry, not yourself
14. Make the value of what your post is about clear in the title
15. Use your blog to promote your special offers
16. Blog consistently and frequently
17. Use whitespace and images to break up text and make it more readable

If your article is good, then people are likely to share it to their own social media channels (and don’t forget to share it to your own networks).

Remember that practice makes perfect. As you continue to write blogs, then over time you’ll hopefully be selling more products and getting new customers coming through your door.  If you need help writing blogs, or other digital marketing services, be sure to view our Services Page.