Blog with love and rank high in Google

1. Introduction: My name is Maria Wullink and I feel working as an SEO expert for a lot of creative entrepreneurs. They successfully made their blogs go high into the sky with visitors. Some even made it to 2,000 blog visitors per month on only one blog subject. This is what I would like you to have to. That's why we made this online Skillshare class. As a creative entrepreneur, you of course want to get your creative things like illustrations and photographs in the spotlight of everybody. But how do you do that? Well, me myself, I do it by posting blogs and blogs that I know people want to read because they're even searching for it. But how do you start to write them? How do you know that they really love them? That's what I do by visualizing. I actually visualize a persona, somebody, an audience, person that's in my audience that I know that she or he would really like to see this content. By making this visualization, I'm digging into this person and I feel that it's already that this person is reading the blog and she loves it or he loves it, and that's how I'm getting into their mind. That's how I make blogs that people are going to love. This class will be about that. You will really deep go into the mind almost of your audience. Then you start to write from love. But I will also give you some tools that you can research. What are these? What is the audience or your persona, your target group searching for online, what do they need? What problems do they have? With some tools, I'm going to tell you what you should do about this. That's what we're going to do today. We're going to dig into your target group, into your persona and then we're going to visualize that they love your blog. We're going to see what tools you can also use to see which problems they have. Come on and join this class with me is just very short, but I'll give you some good examples and tools to use for your blog. 2. What is a persona?: If personas, you can also call it your target group, but then defined by a person. One person. I can give an example of a persona, like Claire, she is 45 years old, she's a business coach, and she's already coaching for like 10 years now, but she wants to make a shift in her business. She would like to attract more lawyers and more corporate managers, to coach them towards success. For the rest, she likes interior design, and her coaching practice is very lot nicely taken care of and her team mugs, they fit in her interior, and rocks, and the floor, they come from Marrakesh, and so you can start imagining her life and that's what you should do with a persona. If you want to have this Claire, this business coach, if you want her to be your persona, you have to start to write blogs, and get hurrying your mind. My first exercise for you, is that you think of one persona, maybe it's already a client that you have and you really love, and they actually want more of them. For this session, I'm going to focus on a woman, so that's why I will mention she, but if you want, you can of course also think of them male version, and yeah. For example, I'm helping an holistic Jim with their content, and their quantum marketing, and the founders are also female and they have really fun while working and working with them is fun and I really get inspired by them. They are like around 40 years old, and they like spirituality, biological projects, and taking good care of their body and mind. That's like one of my persona's and we already had like Claire, that's also another persona, that you could imagine for yourself. But now, I gave you one minute, to write down your persona, for the person that you think would be good for you. 3. Visualization: In this video, I will go and make the visualization with you. We're going to go into the minds of your audience, of your persona, and to see what problems do they have an you are like you're already helping them with their problem. That's what we're going to visualize, and that way, you can really feel what your audience wants and you can make your blog better, a successful post than if you don't do this visualization, I'm sure about that. Let's start this visualization and go with me and close your eyes, maybe don't put distractions in the way so just turn off your phone and try to be silent and then make a good spot for you to visualize. You step into a room that's decorated with great care, and in the room there's a desk with a laptop, and your persona is working there. She's typing really hard and feeling frustrated and not focused because of something she cannot solve. She poured herself some brandy in a large cup. She is staring at her screen and she thought it was so simple to fix this issue, but it's just already taking too much of her time to solve it. Now you can feel her frustration. You feel it just vibrates and feel that you want to hug her and tell her, "It's all going to be al right, as long as we take it step-by-step," and you will guide her. Go grab yourself a chair and sit next to her. You instinctively put your arm around her shoulders to feel more connected or you just put your hand on her if that's too much intimacy and you see some weight lifted off her shoulders, when you do that. You ask her what she is so frustrated about and she starts to tell you a story. When she's finished with her explanation of her story and other problems, you ask if you can show her something on her laptop, she nods yes. You browse to your own website and you show her the blog post that solves her problem in some simple steps. See the smile and the look of the client that she gives you. How happy he is that her problem is solved. She is becoming one of their most precious clients, that's what you can see, you can feel it, and you love it, and you will help her constantly solving her problems, sitting next to her, having a cup of tea, laughing and feeling happy. Now we go back to your own feeling and feel that all your fears are gone, all your fears of that you might not be good enough to help this client. You feel also your shoulders lighten up. You don't feel stressed because the most important thing is you achieve what you want to relieve your client's stress and the worry to solve their problems. This is the end of this visualization. It helps you, before you start to write a blog, to keep your persona in your mind and feel them, and then you start writing the blog. 4. Tools to come up with blog subjects: But what should you write about? That's of course, also very important. I have some tools to find blog subjects to solve their problems. For example, was there a problem that arose when you thought of the client? Are they not getting enough clients? Or are they too busy? For example, if you are like, this business course declare she would like to have lawyers as clients and she wants to start making content for these lawyers. What's the biggest problem that the lawyers are facing? Then you can think of the amount of hours that they are working. You can pick a theme of their problem, so that might be, working overtime or like, work-life balance lawyers. We take now, working overtime. It might be a bigger subject that you can divide in smaller subjects. Like working overtime could already be something big and you just make them solve it with working more efficient. That could be, use like working until late or working in a weekend. Those are some of the themes of working overtime. But let's first start with working overtime and then add this theme into a tool. This tool has free log. I'm going to share my screen with you. Go to answerthepublic.com, and there. There this, funny guy on the background, he can also be a little bit scary, I think actually. We said that we would search for working over time. Let me see if I'm right about that. Here, working over time. Here, I set the language in English, so that all right and then you'll see. Then you click on the orange button and then underneath, you see here a visualization. But I rather like data. Then, there's older data of questions that people are asking around the theme, "working overtime", on Google". But can birth control stop working overtimes? These things are probably not the things that you're looking for. For example, is working over time worth it? Or is working overtime bad? These things or is working overtime compulsory? Especially if you're a business coach, you could help people with, if they are searching for these things. But here in this data, here you just search for the words that added the sentences that you re-like and are in comparison and good with what your persona is searching for. You pick out a few, like maximum 10 and then we use another tool. That's called the Keyword Planner. It's the Keyword Planner of Google AdWords because here, it doesn't say, is working overtime unhealthy, is working overtime healthy, these things, it doesn't say, how often, how many times people search on these keywords. You really need to also know if it's relevant. If people are real, maybe they search for it like once, but once maybe a year and you want them to search for it at least a few times per month. I'm going back to the sentences that I took out, which are these, so these I thought were very good to have and I'm adding them in this left space. Sorry, the background is becoming a little bit noisy. My co-workers have a party during work hours. Okay. Here I am adding the different sentences or they're actually different keywords. Then I say, location. It's not the Netherlands, but that's here, everywhere and then the language, I'm choosing Engels. Then you see the words here or did the keyword sets that I was adding into the tool, how to avoid working overtime. These searches are 20 per month and the competition in Google accurate is low. Actually maybe you are searching for this tool. I will send you a PDF in English, how you can start using this tool. But it's not so easy to make an account. But if you have already Google AdWords, if you're using it already, then you can easily work with it. Otherwise, you have to make an account, so it's a little bit more work. But you'll get a PDF from me, how you can do this easily. Here now you can just watch what I'm doing and then see how this would work for you and if you were to invest a little bit into using Google AdWords. Then you see that, a lot of them don't even have an average monthly search result. It means, say it's less than 10 searches per month. Then, is working overtime mandatory? Well, 30 would also be a nice one. But this one is the best one, is working overtime worth it? 260 times per month, is it search for. That could really work well. I also heard a term like these, and I made a blog post about it. I got like 2,000 views per month on that blog post because you don't only get people that are searching for exact of this terms like, is working overtime worth it? But you also get people that are searching for, I'm working overtime, is it worth it? Like all the other ones, but this one, you just take one, that's the most important for you and then you add it to your blog post, so you start to write about it. The title is; is working overtime worth it? But also, you added two different elements. 5. How to improve the visibility of your blogposts?: If you search for this term in Google, what I already did. I added it here and then I'm searching for it then you can also see how your competition is doing. What is important is, if they have it, this is called the META title and you don't have to see this META title in your CMS, you can also add it as an extra. But if you already have there or if your competition has, "Is working over time worth it?" already in their META tittle, and they are the number one, then they are quite good, but if they don't, you might be better than them. So you might be on the first spot instead of them and then this is the META description. If you also have this exact keyword set also written here, then also you could have more chances of coming high in the search results and may be higher than the one that's now on the top. That's how you can see if you even have a chance to get on top on a Google search results, because when you are not in the top five or not on the first page, you don't make so many clicks to your website. You really should aim for these first five spots in the Google search results. So that's if these companies are also like really big companies and you know that they have a lot of people coming to their website, then maybe it's a bit hard to get on top. What's important to look at this is this META title and a META description. Do they have the search terms like this exactly in this combination in their title or in their META description? No? Then you might be better in it. I will give one more tip away about how you can see if they are better than you. If they also have it here in their URL, actually, your blog should also have it here in the URL. "Is working over time worth it?" Should be exactly like that in the URL. Now, here's working over time is actually worth it. So it's not exactly in the same line. You could make it if you have a lot of followers or people looking at your website. Especially we are here in the Netherlands, and I think these are all more from America. If you tell Google via business.google.com, which is also very good to do actually, then you, your location is in the Netherlands and if I'm searching for, "Is working all the time worth it?" The blog posts that from websites that are closer to me are more likely to end up on top, because they think that the closer they are to you, the more relevant you should have relevant blog post written. But that's why it's good to also add yourself to Google business. What do you actually do is that you go to business.google.com, and you will see here minimalist marketing and that I'm in Amsterdam. Then you can also add some things there so you will be found in Google better, but it's actually to tell Google where you are. Also, if you write blogs, the blogs that are more closer to you, they seem to be more relevant. 6. Recap & where to go for more optimization: Very good that you follow this class and I'm sure that you as a creative business owner or just a creative person, you can change the idea of lawyers and stuff into your own ideas. For example, if you are a videographer or something, you make videos. Then you can add that into the tool and find blog posts for the people that are searching for what you have to offer or they want to know what you could offer. To recap this course, think of a persona. Audience, persona that you really know. You can feel this person, you know what their problems are and you start to write about it and you also did the research for the blog subjects. You know exactly what their problems are and then you start to write about it. They will for sure help and I'm sure that it will attract a lot of people to these blog post. I think you can also do this, especially like what I told, if you make your business local, so add yourself to Google business, and then your blog post will come higher than people that are further away from you. Especially if you live in Europe, in a small country, and you even half a different language. That will make it all much better into your expertise and into a smaller niche that you can blog about. What I would like you to do is to fill in the worksheet that you can download and upload it into the projects, so we can all learn from your persona's and from your blog ideas about how you created this blog ideas and which kind of a persona you've created. That's for us all to learn and also if you have a question for me, you can always send me a message by Instagram. You can go @marjetwullink as my Instagram account and ask me a question by commenting on one of my posts, for example. Even though there in Dutch, everybody knows English in Netherlands and I do too. I hope to see you on Instagram or on my Skillshare class of course.