Write an Original B2B Blog Post by Interviewing an Expert

1. About this Class: If you want your B2B blogposts to rank high on Google, you must ensure that they are original. And for them to be original, you can't rely only on Google for your subject matter. You must interview subject matter experts. After all, thought, leadership is all about having original insights or original ideas and novel ways of seeing your marketplace and the world. You don't get these original insights from Google. That's where everyone else looks. You get original insights by interviewing subject matter experts. The secret to your success is picking the right subject matter expert and conducting an awesome interview. When you pick the right subject matter expert. And when you get them to give you a original insights, you end up writing an original blog post that Google loves and that your customers luck. Hi. I'm Alan sharp and welcome to my course on how to write an original B2B blog post by interviewing an expert. I designed this course for marketers, content writers, and copywriters who need to write unique blog posts that rank well in search that drive traffic and that nurture leads through a sales pipeline. In this course, you'll learn how to pick an expert, how to prepare for your interview, how to pick your format, right? Your opening, establish context, right? The body. Write your conclusion, right, your call to action and optimize your post for search. You're going to look over my shoulder as I start with a blank screen and write a B2B blog post from scratch, guiding you every step of the way. Learn the things you must do, the blunders you must avoid, and the best practices you must follow to make your original B2B blog post awesome and effective. I had been writing blog posts since blogging became a thing, which was sometime around 2003. I have been interviewing subject matter experts and turning their answers into unique blog posts for two decades. In this course, I show you all that I've learned the hard way. Along the way. If you need to write original B2B blog posts that attract website visitors, engage your buyers and position you and your company as a thought leader. Checkout, the detailed description below, watched the free preview lessons, read the reviews from my satisfied students that enroll today. 2. Discover Five Essentials: If you want to write an original B2B blog post by interviewing a subject matter expert. The first thing you must do before interviewing your expert and before writing a single word is discover why you are writing. Every blog post serves a purpose. Every post has a goal and your first-order of business before you start writing is to discover your goal. You need to know your reason for writing because the majority of subject matter experts that you interview aren't salespeople or marketers. They are engineers, developers, project managers, supply chain managers, logisticians, technicians, you name it, they are unfamiliar with the business side of sales and marketing. You know, your marketing goal, but they don't, and so they won't give you the answers you need unless you go into your interview prepared. So here's how you prepare. The first thing you need to discover is the keyword you are targeting with your blog post. You are writing your post either to answer a question, solve a problem, or help your reader make a purchase. Before you ask your subject matter expert a single question, you need to know what your reader wants to get out of your post. You must know their search intent. Search intense simply means the reason that someone conducts a search. Search intent tells you what the searcher hopes to accomplish with their search and what they hope to get out of your blog post when they read it. Let me give you an example from the world of casters. In warehouses across the country, you find carts that workers push down the aisles and load up with parts and products. These carts typically have forecasters one on each corner of the cart. These casters are notorious for causing problems in warehouses. Some casters are noisy. Other casters are poorly made and fall apart while the cart is being pushed. Some casters have rubber treads that leave black marks on warehouse floors. Some casters feature a king pin design that fails prematurely. Because of these many problems, warehouse managers often go online and conduct searches related to casters. They search for best casters for concrete. Why use King painless casters? Heavy-duty caster wheels and anti-static versus ESD caster. Your goal before you write is to discover the buyer intent behind the keyword you are targeting. As you can see, each of these search terms has a different buyer intent. The first searcher is likely looking to buy something. They are searching for the best caster for a specific type of floor. The second searcher is looking for an answer. They want to know why King Pinellas casters are better than casters that have kingpins. The third searcher is looking to buy casters and heavy-duty casters in particular. And the fourth searcher is looking for an answer to a question about which casters are the best at preventing electrostatic discharge. The thing to bear in mind is that B2B searches fall into two main categories. Your potential customers go online and conduct a search either because they want to buy something or because they want to learn something. These two search intense have a large bearing on the kind of post you right? Someone looking to buy a heavy-duty caster doesn't want to read all about them. They want to make a purchase. And someone looking for answers about whether anti-static casters are better than ESD casters doesn't want to see product specs or price comparisons or have here a pitch. They are looking for information, not a sales pitch. This means before you conduct your interview, you must determine if your reader is looking to buy something or is looking to learn something. You discover this by understanding the intent behind the keyword you are targeting. The second thing you need to nail down before you interview your subject matter expert is the reader of your post. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of B2B buyers, business buyers and technical buyers. A business by our cares about costs, return on investment, profit margins, productivity, and other business metrics. A technical buyer cares about product weights, lengths, voltages, inputs, outputs, implementation, customization, technical support and other. Technical product specifications. In keeping with our Casta example, the business buyer wants to read about casters that reduce maintenance costs while the technical buyer wants to know if the casters have a weight rating of £2 thousand, you get the idea. The third thing you need to know before sitting down to interview a subject matter expert for your blog post is where your reader is in their buyer journey. Every buyer starts their journey by realizing they have a problem. At the awareness stage, they discover they have a pain, an issue, a problem, a challenge, or something else they need to solve. They start searching for answers to their issue. Then they move to the middle stage, the consideration stage, where they consider how to solve their problem. They consider fixing it themselves, for example, and they also consider buying a solution. Finally, they arrive at the third and final stage, the buyer journey, the decision stage. Here, they look for vendors, suppliers, companies, products and services to buy. In keeping with our caster example, a buyer at the awareness stage searches for why casters mark floors. At the consideration stage, that same buyer searches for best caster tread for not marking floors, and that the decision stage they searched for by polyurethane casters or polyurethane casters near me. Once you interview enough subject matter experts, you realize they don't speak the language of sales and marketing most of the time. In my role as a B-to-B copywriter who specializes in manufacturing and heavy industry. I interview a lot of engineers. They don't generally know much about keywords or search engine optimization or Meta tags or buyer personas or even buyer journeys for that matter. This means one of your challenges when sitting down with a subject matter expert is to get them up to speed as quickly as possible on why you are interviewing them. You must give them some contexts, some sort of frame of reference for them to be able to get their head around what you are going to discuss during your interview. I have learned over the years that the easiest and most effective way to do this is to always have a working title for my blog post before I interview my subject matter expert. A working title is a temporary title, a tentative title that you give your blog post while it is under development, while you're researching and writing it. A working title is subject to change of course, but it captures the essence of what your post is going to be about. It helps your subject matter expert understand the topic of your blog post, who the intended reader is, the gist of what they're going to say in the post. As you'll see in our next lesson, knowing you're working title is the key to conducting a successful interview with a subject matter experts. The fifth and final thing you need to know is the length of your blog post. In words, you need to know your word count. The length of your post determines how long you must talk with your subject matter expert and the number of questions you must ask, the longer your posts, the longer your interview. This is how you prepare for your interview with your subject matter expert. You discover the keyword you are targeting with your post. You discover which type of buyer you are writing for. You learn where the spire is in their buyer journey. You craft a working title for your post and you determine your word count. Once you know these five things, you are ready to ask the questions that give you the answers you need to write an original blog post. You know what you are writing, you know who you are writing to and when and why. 3. Interview Your Subject-Matter Expert: The easiest way to write an original B2B blog post is to interview a subject matter expert. You are not an expert on the topic you are writing about. So you must find someone who is an interview them. You need to discover their original insights there. Insider information and their expertise on the topic you are writing about. As we discussed in the previous lesson, you must know five things before you sit down for this interview. You must know the keyword you are targeting, the buyer persona you are writing for, their stage and the buyer journey, you're working title and your word count. Once you know these five things, you are prepared for your subject matter expert interview. To conduct an effective interview with a subject matter expert. The most important thing you need in front of you is you're working title. When you have a tentative title in front of you, you help your subject matter expert and yourself know where the interview is going. You're working title acts as your roadmap for your discussion. Let me show you how you should interview your subject matter expert. This is a process that I have developed and perfected over 30 years as a B-to-B copywriter, it works for me. So I hope it will work for you. Open a new Microsoft Word document and save it with a filename that contains the working title and SME interview notes, unquote. Then at the top of the document type interview with and put the name of your subject matter expert, their job title, and their company. Hit Return and type out the working title of your blog post. Hit Return again and type out the keyword you are targeting with this post. Then describe the buyer persona you are targeting. Then type their stage in the buyer journey. And finally, write in the word count. As you can see, you are conducting an interview with a subject matter expert at a company called caster central. They design engineer and manufacturer casters for commercial and industrial applications. You are interviewing this expert for a post. You are writing about a specific type of caster. The working title of your post is understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. The keyword you are targeting is anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. This is a common search term that potential customers type into Google, Cast or central cells, a line of these casters and wants to rank at the top of search results for this search term. The buyer persona that you and I are targeting in this blog post is a production manager. This is a technical buyer who needs to source this specialty type of caster. This buyer is usually at either the awareness stage or the consideration stage of their buying journey when they conduct a Google search using this term. The number of words that you and I are aiming to write on this topic is 700. Once you have written all of this down, you are ready to pick up the phone or hop onto Zoom, or even literally sit down with your subject matter expert for your interview. I highly recommend you do this over a Zoom call so that you can share your screen. At the scheduled time. You start your Zoom meeting and you say something like this hybrid. I'm Alan sharp. I am working with your marketing department to write a post for your company. You and I are meeting today so that you can give me the details and insights I need to write this post. Let me give you some background. I am writing a post that we're tentatively calling understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. So that's what you and I are discussing today. Our reader for this post, the buyer we're hoping to reach is a production manager who was either learning about these casters for the first time or who is deciding which type of caster they need to buy? Is it okay if I record this call? Thanks. This is how you set up the interview. You prepare your interview subject so that they know exactly why you are calling, what you are discussing and what you hope to accomplish during the call with their help. Now I recommend that you share your screen so that your subject sees what you are typing as you go along in your interview. Your goal during the interview is not only to gather the content that you need for your post, your goal is also to create the outline for how you're going to structure your posts, the order that you should follow. Now you'll remember that the most important thing you should know before you hop on your interview is your working title. This is because you're working title determines what you need to discover during your interview. You're working title determines the questions you must ask and the answers you must get in order to write your post. I'm repeating myself of course, but our working title is understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. And the thing to remember about all blog post titles is that they make a promise to the reader. Every title says, read this post and you will get an answer to your question, or you will learn how to solve your problem, or you will learn how to do something or discover how to make a decision. Your post title is your promise and the body of your post delivers on your promise. That's the idea. So let's look at our working title and see how it determines the questions that we have to ask. And the structure that are post, should take. First on our list of questions is going to be one that nails down some definitions. Remember, our target reader for this post might be at the start of their buyer journey. They might not understand these terms. So our first question should be, what is an anti-static caster wheel? Our next question should be, what is an ESD caster wheel? Next, we're going to ask questions that help us understand why these types of wheels are important. In other words, why the reader of our post wants to learn about them. So we're gonna ask something like this. Why do our customers need anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels. Remember that every need implies a consequence. If a buyer needs a product, there's usually a consequence they must face if they don't buy it. So our next question should be, what happens if our customer doesn't use anti-static caster wheels or ESD caster wheels on their cards. Now that we have defined our topic and now that we have described why our customer needs to care about it, we're ready to ask the questions that help us get to the heart of our topic, namely, the ways in which these two types of testers are different. Our question might be, and what major ways are anti-static caster wheels different from ESD caster wheels? Now let's consider our keyword again. Anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. You can see that the searcher wants to not only know the difference between these two casters, but also wants to know why they should buy one rather than the other. This prompts you to ask a series of questions that answer this question for our readers, such as, why should a buyer choose one type of caster over the other? What applications require an anti-static caster wheel? What applications require an ESD caster wheel? What happens if a buyer uses the wrong type of Caster? You get the idea. You take your working title and you parse it out into its component parts, and you ask a series of logical questions that help you understand what you need to know to write an original post on the topic, you put yourself in the reader's shoes and you ask the questions that they want answers to. And you ask them in the same order that you think a potential client, It's going to ask them in. What you do during your interview is share this document on your screen as you're talking with your subject matter expert as they speak, you jot down in point form what they say. You turn their answers into bullet points that outline what they are saying. You only write in bullets because you're recording the interview. You don't need to write down what your subject says word for word that takes too long and it's really frustrating for them. The big advantage of sharing your document like this is that it helps you structure your post. You and your subject matter expert collaborate on what to say and where to say it. And your post, you agree on what is relevant to your reader and where it belongs in the post. At the end of your interview, you end up with a document that looks like this. Beneath each question you asked, You have the points that outline what you will write in your post. Doing this collaboratively and live with your subject matter expert saves you a ton of time. During the approval process. They help you structure your post in the best way and they give you the insights you need to write a post that is truly thought leadership. Once you have completed your interview, you are ready to start writing. That's what we cover in the next lesson. 4. 10 Secrets to a Successful SME Interview: If you want to write an original B2B blog post, you can't just go online and research your topic. Otherwise, you'll just end up regurgitating other people's ideas. Instead, you must interview an expert on your subject. Just remember, the success of your blog post depends on the success of your interview. Here are ten tips for conducting an effective interview with a subject matter expert. Number one, work from a list of prepared questions. Don't use Google to write your post, but do use Google to help you craft a series of questions for your interview. Before it starts. You don't want to wing it with an expert. Instead to make the best use of their time and yours, draw up a list of questions that you want to ask during the interview. Arrange them in the order that you will write the blog post. Use your working title as a starting point. Consider the challenge you are solving, the problem. You are addressing, the question you're answering or the solution you are describing. And then write out a series of logical questions to use in the interview. Number to send your interview subject your questions in advance. The best interview subject is a prepared subject. To get the most out of your interview, don't go in cold. Instead, give your expert a heads-up at least a week before the interview and send them your interview questions ahead of time. Very few people are good at speaking off the cuff. When you ask them a question that they're not expecting. To get the answers you need. Give your subject matter expert the list of questions you're going to ask, or at the very least, describe the topics and the themes of the subjects and the issues you're going to discuss during the interview. This way you help them prepare for the discussion. You give. You. Help them gather their thoughts, clarify their thinking, gathered background resources, and generally prepare in such a way that you get what you need from them. Number three, take notes during the interview. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in an interview is turning on your recorder and hoping you will make sense of the interview later on. For one thing, your recorder might fail, leaving you with nothing. Don't ask me how I know. And second, you need to take notes so that you keep track of what you have asked, what the subject has answered, and whether you are still on track. Number four, ask follow up questions. Your results may vary. But my experience in 30 years of conducting interviews is that the questions I have in my hand, walking into the interview are never sufficient. Subject matter experts are often either too brief or too long-winded, or too technical, or too cryptic. The secret to conducting an effective interview is follow up questions. You must be prepared to ask your subject follow-up questions that draw them out and get them to talk more fully about any given issue. Whenever your subject matter expert answers your questions with just a few words, or they give you an answer filled with jargon and acronyms. Or the answer in a way that brings up a vital issue you haven't even considered. Ask follow-up questions. Five, review your outline as you proceed. I find that the best interviews are collaborative. Since I conduct almost all of my interviews over Zoom, I'd like to share my screen with my interview subject. I let them see my questions. I let them see how I have written out their answers in point form. Do so. I beg your pardon. Doing so helps us both see if our interview is going as planned. Remember, you should ask your questions in the order that they will appear in your post. This means your list of questions is an informal outline of your posts. As you write down your experts answers to each question, you both see. If your post is taking shape the way you want it too. You will find that when you share your screen like this, your expert will be more engaged and more helpful. They will often say during the interview, Hey Allan, I just thought of something that belongs under the second can you scroll up to that point? Yeah. Right there. Can you add so and so or such and such. Number Six, be ready to shift gears. Be willing to follow a new line of thought or a different blog post topic if needed. You head into your interview with a working title. But you may find that the subject matter expert disagrees with your premise or has a better way of framing the issue. For example, I once sat down to interview an expert and my working title was the top blunders analysts make when comparing natural gas rates. But my expert corrected me. She said, analysts don't make blunders when comparing rates. They make blunders when gathering those rates from various online sources. This meant I had to change gears during the interview and head and a brand new or at least I tweaked direction. I was prepared to do so. You need to be prepared to do this as well, particularly if you're interviewing a customer-facing sales rep or a sales engineer who knows what potential customer's need better than the folks in your marketing department to. A marketing manager may give you a blog post topic that doesn't match the reality marketplace. So be prepared to follow your expert if they take your interview in a different direction. Number seven, don't interrupt. One of the quickest ways to lose the trust and respect of your subject matter expert is to interrupt them. So be on your guard during interviews so that you let your experts speak freely and candidly. If you absolutely must interject, raise your hand rather than interrupt them, let your subject see that you have something to say. Number eight, ask your expert to define terms. Technical experts speak in jargon. They use buzzwords, acronyms, abbreviations, insider language, slang, and all sorts of other phrases that they understand. But you don't. If you're uncertain about anything, you're experts says, ask them to define their terms. Ask them to spell out acronyms and initialism. And abbreviations. Ask them to clarify what they mean when they use terms or language that you don't understand. Number nine, ask your expert to point you to resources that explain boilerplate information. Whenever you are interviewing a subject matter expert on a topic that you are unfamiliar with, you will discover that there are some things that you simply have to know before you can write your posts. In any technical field, there are basic principles, common processes, universal truths, and so on, that everyone in the industry knows and understands. I'm talking about boilerplate stuff here, the stuff that everyone knows except you and me. Whenever you come across one of these pieces of information during your interview, ask your expert where you should look to get the background information that you need to better understand the matter. Don't ask them to explain or describe anything that is commonplace and that you can learn the simple Google search. And number ten, throughout the interview. Always be asking yourself, are we fulfilling the promise of our working title? You'll remember from the last lesson that all blog post titles make a promise to the reader. Every blog post title says, read this post and you will get an answer to your question, or you will learn how to solve your problem, or you'll learn how to do something or discover how to make a decision. Your post title is your promise, and the body of your post delivers on your promise. So this means you must pay attention throughout your interview to make sure that your subject matter expert is filling in the gaps and providing the details and giving you the answers you need to fulfill the promise of your post title. Having your questions on the screen and sharing them with your expert during the interview helps you do this really, really well. By the way, one advantage of sharing your screen is that as your subject is talking, you can add questions, you can highlight answers, and you can insert reminders to yourself about things you must cover before your interview ends. This gives you a visual way of ensuring that you complete your outline before concluding your interview. When you follow these ten best practices, you conduct successful interviews. Your subject matter experts, or more at ease. They collaborate with you more freely and they give you the answers you need with less effort required on their part and yours. When you conduct an awesome interview, you end up with the material you need to craft an awesome blog post. That post must start with an awesome opening sentence. You'll learn why and how. In the next lesson. 5. Craft Your Opening: The most important sentence in any B2B blog post is your first sentence. The first sentence is where you must grab attention, arouse curiosity, and give your reader a reason to continue reading. If your first sentence is a flop, your post will be a flop. Just so there are no misunderstandings. This is what I'm talking about. Here is a post on IBM's security intelligence blog. Look at the top of the post and you see the post title. You might also think of this as the headline. Beneath the title is the featured image, the blog category, the author and the date of publication. And beneath that image is the post. The post always starts with an opening sentence. Here it is. This is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about this first sentence that your reader comes across in your post. Research over the years shows that 55% of your readers will read your post for up to 15 seconds and then quit. If you want them to read your post for longer than that. This is where you must start at the start of your post, right here in the opening sentence. To grab and keep the attention of your reader, you must do three things and do them really, really quickly. First, you must establish relevance. You must demonstrate immediately that this post is relevant. Your reader, that it covers a topic or addresses an issue that they care about right now. The easiest and quickest way to establish relevance is to include the search term you are targeting in your first sentence. When read or see the search term that they just typed into Google appearing in the first sentence of your post. They know they have landed in the right place. Maybe. I say maybe. Because the second thing you must communicate with your first sentence is a benefit. You must give your reader an incentive for reading. You must offer them something of value. They must learn from your first sentence that there was something in it for them. If they continue reading. One of the easiest ways to do this is to present a problem that you know your reader has or to ask a question that you know they are asking or to name a challenge that you know, they are facing and to then let them know that your post supplies the answer or the remedy they are seeking. The third and final thing, your first sentence must establish a sense of urgency. You must establish as quickly as possible. There is an implied cost to not reading your posts that the reader will lose out somehow if they click away. When you're first sentence establishes relevance, communicates a benefit and establishes urgency. You hook your reader, you give them solid motivation for continuing to read your post. Now, let's leave the world of theory and enter the world of practical reality to see what I mean, you'll remember from a previous lesson that we are writing a B2B blog post for a company that manufactures and sells casters, those swiveling wheels that go on the bottoms of chairs, carts, dollies, rolling furniture and other movable equipment like IV poles in hospitals. You'll remember that we are writing a post that has this working title. Understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. This is what our interview notes look like. The items in bold are the questions we asked our subject matter expert and the bulleted items beneath the answers they gave in point form. Now we are ready to start writing our post. We start by consulting our interview notes, which also serve as an informal outline for our post. But first, let me give you some context before we actually start writing. Have you ever walked across a floor and touch something metal and received an electric shock, that spark. That shock was caused by a buildup of static electricity that you gathered with your feet walking across the floor. You experienced what's known as an electro static. Discharge. This same thing happens in commercial settings. Workers push carts around a warehouse or an operating room in a hospital, or a clean room in an electronics plant. And the casters on the cart buildup static electricity from the floor. If the worker pushes the cart up against an object, such as a workbench, the cart will conduct this static electricity to that object. This is a problem because static electricity harms electronic components and it ignites gases. Businesses that operate carts in these kinds of environments need a safe way to prevent this from happening. They do this by installing special casters on their carts that conduct the static electricity out of the cart and into the floor. Buyers who are looking for these types of cancers commonly go online and search using the term that we are targeting in our blog posts, which is anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. These buyers are looking for the differences between these two types of casters. Notice that word versus they are wanting to compare these two types of casters with each other to discover which one they need, which one they should buy. Alright, so that is the background, the context you need to understand as we sit down to write the opening sentence of our posts. So let's look at our interview notes. Again. We remember because we noted it in the outline during our interview that are subject matter experts said something really interesting. During our interview. They said quote, anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels are the same thing. Buyers are confused over those points, unquote. This gives us what we need to write our opening sentence. Anytime your reader is confused or puzzled or mistaken about something that is a great opportunity for you to grab their attention and offer clarification. So that's what we do with our first sentence. This is what we write. Quote, If you are looking for the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. You need to make sure you are asking the right question because these two terms are often used interchangeably and incorrectly to describe the same type of wheel unquote. The first thing we do is demonstrate relevance by putting the reader search term right at the start of our sentence. If you are looking for the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. That's our keyword. And notice that we start our sentence with, if this is the kind of word that simply forces your reader to read right to the end of your first sentence. When people see a sentence beginning with if they naturally want to know if what they read all the way to the end of your sentence to find out what your life is about. Next, we offer a benefit by writing quote, you need to make sure you are asking the right question because these two terms are often used interchangeably and incorrectly to describe the same type of wheel, unquote. Now, this doesn't state the benefit outright. I admit. Instead, it implies the benefit, the benefit to you, the reader of continuing with this post, is that you will clarify your thinking when it comes to the difference between these two types of casters. Why? Because clearly, it's possible to ask the wrong question on this issue. It's possible to think about these two types of casters in correctly. The final sentence in the opening paragraph sets up the urgency. Quote. If you want to prevent damage from electrostatic discharge, you must understand this key point, unquote. Now, you could be even more blatant than this if you want to, you could write, if you want to prevent damage from electrostatic discharge, continue reading. To understand this key point. You will see that we have crafted a compelling opening by focusing on a misunderstanding that many buyers have when they are looking for casters that prevent a electrostatic discharge. Your goal with every posterior right, is to discover an equivalent Issue. Find the single issue, the single pane, the single question that belongs at the start of your post, and then put it there. 6. Pick Your Format: Once you have a working title for your blog post, and once you have crafted the first few opening sentences, you must decide on the format you're going to follow for the rest of your post. You have a number of formats to choose from. Each one dictated by your topic and you're working title. You'll remember that we are writing a post that is tentatively titled. Understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. One option at our disposal is to use the FAQs format. We could frame this post as a set of answers to frequently asked questions. So we would tweak the title to FAQs about the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. And then we format our post as a series of questions and answers like this question, what is static electricity? And we give the answer question, why is electrostatic discharge harmful? We give our answer question, what are conductive caster wheels? We give our answer. As you can see, each question is a heading and each answer is a paragraph beneath that heading. So this is one way we can format our post. Another option is the listicle. A listicle as a blog post that turns a list into an article. You take list and you add it to article and you end up with listicle. Now, I don't like that term anymore that you do, but there you are. To use this format. We tweak our title to top for differences between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. And then we draw up a list of differences. We start with number one, and we work our way down the list to number four. This is one of the most popular blog post formats. Another popular format is the y format. You take a topic and explain the why of it. You typically do this because the search term you're targeting contains the word why. For example, people search for why is electrostatic discharge harmful. If we were following the wide format, we would answer this question with a series of subheads, one for each region, followed by a paragraph or two after each subhead. Like this. Electrostatic discharge is harmful because it damages sensitive electronics. Electrostatic discharge is harmful because it ignites gases. Electrostatic discharge is harmful because it increases risk. You get the idea. The same goes for another popular post format, the how to format. With this post structure instead of answering the why, you explain the how. Typically, this involves writing a series of steps that describe how to do a task such as how to prevent electrostatic discharge. Step one, understand your electrostatic environment. Step to understand your risks. Step three, decide on your type of anti-static caster. As you can probably tell, the format you follow for your post is partly determined by the keyword you are targeting, and partly by your personal preference. You choose the format that best suits both. In our case, our format is determined for us by the keyword phrase we are targeting with. She'll remember. Here it is again, anti-static caster wheels versus ESD, caster wheels with emphasis on the word versus buyers who typed this phrase into Google are expecting to find a blog post that compares and contrasts these two types of casters in a way that reveals which one is better. They aren't just looking for a comparison. They are looking for a reason to choose one type of caster over the other. This is how we are going to format our post to give our reader what they clearly are searching for. We're going to format our post like this. This is our post laid out as two pages side-by-side. On the left. You see that after our opening paragraphs, we have our first division. Here we describe the challenge of static electricity and why it is a problem for commercial facilities. Moving down in our next division, we discussed the first type of caster, which is conductive caster wheels. We describe what they are. Then we list their advantages and disadvantages. On the right-hand page, you see that we then move on to the next type of caster, which is static dissipative caster wheels. We describe what they are and how they are different from conductive caster wheels. And then we list their advantages and disadvantages. In the following section, we compare and contrast the two types of casters side-by-side. We do this because our post is showing the merits of one caster against another. One of the best ways or easiest ways to get this information across to readers is with a simple table like this. Then we end our post with a conclusion and a call to action. One thing to remember when deciding on which format to use for your blog post is that your reader determines your format, examine the search term you are targeting. Get into the mind of your potential customers and you'll figure out what they are looking for with that search term. Then format your post so that you give your reader exactly what they are looking for. We'll see how to do that in the next lesson. 7. Establish Your Context: Once you have written the opening for your blog post, and once you have decided on the format, you're going to follow, you are ready to write the body of your post. The body of a blog post is essentially everything that appears between the opening few sentences and the conclusion. Typical blog post after all, consists of a title at the top, followed by an opening sentence or paragraph, then the body of the post, and it ends with a conclusion and a call to action. You'll also remember a few things about where we are. At the moment. We have our working title and we know the keyword phrase that we are targeting in this post. And we have written our opening sentence actually our first couple of sentences. You'll also remember that during our interview with our subject matter expert, he told us anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels are really the same thing. Buyers are confused over this point. This means the people who are going to read our post, the ones who type in our search term anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. When they type that into a search engine, they are likely confused. They don't understand these two terms. This means we must give them some context. Before we jump in and start comparing anti-static caster wheels with ESD caster wheels. So you must first establish what static electricity is and why it's a problem. So we do this with a transition sentence. Actually, we do this with two transition sentences. At the end of our opening, we write the difference that you are likely looking for is in the types of ESD caster wheels. There are two, conductive and static dissipative, but first a word about static electricity. Then we craft our first major section. We call it the challenge of static electricity, and we assign it a style in Microsoft Word of heading to. This corresponds with the H2 heading in HTML markup. If we copy and paste this copy and put it into a blogging platform like WordPress. It automatically transforms the Microsoft heading two into an HTML heading of H2. After writing our opening, we write two paragraphs that set up our reader for all of the comparison that follows. As carts move around your facility on casters, they generate static electricity. There is no path for this electricity to dissipate. The carts retained this static electricity. When this electricity trend servers from one object to another, from a cart to a workbench, for example, this is called a electrostatic discharge. This electrostatic discharge damages valuable electrical components. It ignites gases. It also affects clean rooms and medical areas by causing dust particles to cling together, which prevents the dust particles from entering filtration systems, so-called anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels prevent this electrostatic discharge by conducting static electricity out of the cart and into the floor. Notice a few things about how we have written this. First, we take our reader from the familiar to the unfamiliar. We talked first about the carts in their facility which are on casters. This is something they know about. And then we describe how these carts generate static electricity, which they probably know about. Then we explain how this static electricity moves from the carts to other objects by way of a phenomenon called electrostatic discharge. And finally, we describe the damage that electrostatic discharge causes. This is how you should give your readers context. You start by describing something they know and you take them from there to something they likely don't know. You go from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Notice also that we define a key term, electrostatic discharge. We define what it is, how it happens and the damage it causes. This is vital to do early on in our post because our post discusses the types of casters that prevent this very thing. Electrostatic discharge, our leaders must understand the disease before they can accept the cure. So we define electrostatic discharge for them before we launch into our comparison of casters. Finally, notice that we include our reader in our story. We don't write about carts and facilities in the abstract. We instead write about carts that move around your facility. On casters. We mentioned how this electrostatic discharge damages your valuable electrical components and prevents dust particles from entering your filtration systems. Finally, we mentioned how special casters prevent electrostatic discharge by conducting static electricity out of the cart and into your floor. Now what we're doing here with the word you and your is a classic copywriting technique. You'd never say companies. When you can instead say your company, you never say they. When you can instead say you. You will see that we have supplied this context for our readers in the form of two paragraphs. I make this point because blog posts aren't advertising copy. I know because I write both. I'm a copywriter who also writes blog posts. But what works in copywriting doesn't always work in blog post writing. For example, in copywriting, you can get away with writing paragraphs that consists of just one sentence, sometimes just one word. But blogposts are different. You write them to inform rather than to persuade. You write them to take your reader on a journey not to compel them to buy something or do something. This means you should write your blog posts in paragraphs. You should write self-contained blocks of texts that deal with a particular point or idea. You should make a point, expand on that point, and then conclude your point. Writing your post and paragraphs helps you organize your thoughts and arrange them in a logical, coherent order. Having said that, one thing to remember about blogposts is that your readers read them on electronic devices, whether that's desktop computers or laptops or tablets or even phones. One way to keep your readers engaged is to add visual variety to your posts. So instead of just writing paragraph after paragraph of solid text, you divide your texts visually whenever possible. The best place to do this is wherever you have a list of things to say, instead of writing out a list of items one after the other in a solid block of text. You break out these items into a series of bullets or a numbered list. In this section that we just wrote, for example, the one on context. We used a paragraph to describe the hazards of electrostatic discharge, but we could just as easily have rendered these facts as a bulleted list like this. On the left is the paragraph we wrote. On the right is the same information tweaked a little bit here and there as a bulleted list. As you can see, the bulleted list is easier to read at a glance. Just remember that not all information can be turned into bullets. Sometimes you should make your points in paragraphs. Sometimes you should add some visual variety to your writing with bullets, numbered lists. Now that we have nailed down our opening and supplied the brief context that our readers need to understand what follows we are ready to write what follows. See you there. 8. Write the Body: Let's continue writing our blog post about the difference between anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels. We have written our opening. We have given our readers some contexts. And now we are ready to write the body of the post, which is a comparison of these two types of specialty casters. The way you write the body of your post depends on the format you have chosen. Now, in a previous lesson, we discussed the formats you have to choose from. You can format your post as a top ten type of post, starting with number one and working your way down the post, the number ten. We also talked about formatting your post as answers to frequently asked questions on the topic of your post. In this post, our format is already determined for us by the keyword we are targeting and our keyword, as you'll remember, since I've said many times, is anti-static caster wheels versus EST Casta wheels are Reader is clearly looking for a post that compares and contrasts two types of casters. And so this is the format we're going to use the body of our posts. We start with the first type of Castor and we name it in our H2 heading, conductive caster, wheel, pros and cons. Then beneath that heading, we describe this type of caster. We describe what it is. It is manufactured, the materials used in its manufacturer and everything else. Our subject matter expert told us in our interview that is important for buyers to know. We don't put everything in there. Then within this section we create a list of the advantages of this type of cast or analyst of the advantages. Then we create a new section with an H2 heading, static, dissipative, caster wheel, pros and cons. And then beneath that heading, we go through the same exercise we described the caster. We list its advantages and disadvantages. You'll agree that this is a straightforward process. And that's because the keyword we are targeting is one that requires a straightforward blog format. Our reader is looking for an explanation of why each type of Caster is different. A description of the pros and cons of each caster and some advice on which one our reader should buy. So that's what we give them. I can't tell you how to write this section of your blog post because I don't know the keyword you are targeting. I don't know the buyer persona you are writing for or the format you're using. But here are some tips on writing this part of your posts, the body of your posts. First, follow the inverted pyramid. In journalism, the inverted pyramid refers to a story structure where you present the most important information. First, the base of the pyramid. You put the who, the, what, the, why, the where, the when and how at the start of your story. And then you follow that with supporting details and background information getting less and less important as you go down. When I started as a writer way, way back in the 1980s, I followed this writing format because I knew that my editor would always cut my copy from the bottom. In those days, we wrote for print in column inches. If I wrote a piece that was seven inches long for a newspaper, but the layout artist only had room for six inches of copy. The editor literally trimmed my piece by cutting off the bottom inch of copy. Editors in those days always cut from the bottom because they knew that the piece was written using the inverted pyramid method with the most important information at the top and the least important information at the bottom. You should write your posts in the same way, assuming that your reader will not read your piece right to the end. I know it happens. Your entire post should be written this way. You write each section of your posts with the important information first and the background less important information. Last, remember you won't be in doubt about what's vital and what secondary about what you must include and what you could leave out. Because you will be writing your post from an outline. That outline will be one that you created collaboratively with your subject matter expert. During your interview, they told you what was important and what was less important and what was least important. And you structured your blog post outline accordingly. Second, right to maintain momentum. Assume that your reader will not read your post all the way through. So write your post in such a way that you compel your reader to continue reading. Look back at our opening, for example. And you see that we ended that section with this sentence. But first, a word about static electricity. That's a transition that simply forces the reader to continue reading. Then at the end of the next section, we ended by writing so-called anti-static caster wheels. And ESD caster wheels prevent this electrostatic discharge by conducting static electricity out of the cart and then to your floor. Here's how if your reader wants to learn how they must continue reading. That's what I mean when I say maintain momentum in your writing. The other way you do this is by how you structure your post. In this case, our post is about two types of casters. So we discussed one casts are first and then the second caster second. This makes our reader want to continue reading after they have finished reading about the first one they know well, there's another Castro I have to know about and so they continue reading, they keep up their momentum. Then within each section about each caster, we feature the advantages followed by the disadvantages. Now, most readers can't bear to simply read a list of advantages. They want to discover the disadvantages as well. And so by structuring our, our post this way, we encourage our reader to continue reading, moving through our post section by section until they get to the bottom. The key to building and maintaining momentum in your writing is to think conceptually and visually. Break down your writing into concepts that follow logically one after the other, forcing your reader to continue reading if they want to understand your total points. But you also think visually, because how your words appear on the screen also determines how likely your readers are to continue reading. Our post, for example, features a comparison of two types of anti-static casters. One of the best ways to make this comparison is with a table. A table is a visual way of arranging your text. A table presents your words in a way that is both visually pleasing and more effective. This is what we do here in our post. After discussing each caster in turn, we create a simple table and compare each caster with the other one, feature by feature. We do this under a section titled conductive caster wheels versus static dissipative caster wheels, which we use as an H2. Heading. Down the left column, we list the features arranged in order from most important feature to least important feature. Then in the next two columns, we describe how each caster ranks for each of these features. For ESD protection, for example, the one Caster is the best of the two, while the other Caster is merely good for shelf life. The one Castro has a moderate shelf life while the other costs or has a high shelf life, you get the idea when your post demands it or when you believe the case warrants it, structure your words as a table or a graphic element like this. If necessary, insert a comment into the margin to tell your designer how to lay out the table or how to format the columns and rows, or how to highlight the differences you are trying to communicate. As you can see, you can also give your designer directions from within the copy. You'll see at the top of each column, for example, we use editorial brackets to tell the designer to insert an image of the caster above each column. There you have it. When you write the body of your blog post, follow the format that your readers are expecting. Use the inverted pyramid as you write, right, to maintain momentum and think visually. Do all of these things. And you'll craft a compelling post. 9. Write Your Conclusion & CTA: Every blog post you write should end with a conclusion and a call to action. Your conclusion answers the so-what question and your call to action tells your reader what to do next. Here are some tips on how to write both. First of all, don't just write a summary. A summary simply reiterates what you have already said in your post. If you have written about three steps to buying a corporate firewall, for example, then all that your summary does is summarize these three steps by repeating them. That's not very helpful, especially with short posts where all the summary does is repeat what the reader has already just read. Instead, arrive at a conclusion. Instead of just summarizing what you have just written, reach a verdict, arrive at a determination, reach a resolution, or in some way, explain the point or the lesson that your reader is to learn or draw from what you have just written. Your conclusion reveals the key takeaway of your post. Let me show you what I mean. Here is the conclusion for the post that we have just written about the difference between anti-static caster wheels and ESD caster wheels. We start with a quick summary statements. As you can see, the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels is really the difference between conductive caster wheels versus static dissipative caster wheels. This reiterates the main point we made at the start of our post, the one that clarified a common misunderstanding about these cancers that are readers likely have. We then sum up our two primary findings. The ones that are readers care most about, each type of wheel has its advantages and disadvantages. The caster that offers the best protection is the conductive caster wheel. And the one that is most suitable for cleaning rooms is the dissipative caster wheel. Then, in the concluding sentence of our conclusion, we reach our conclusion. Choosing the right caster for your unique situation lowers your risk, optimizes production, and optimizes workplace safety. So be sure to make the right choice. This sentence introduces a new thought, an original idea that we haven't covered elsewhere in our post. It answers the so-what question that our readers may have lingering in their brains. If our readers get this far and wonder why we have just told them what we have just told them. We reply, choosing the right casts or for your unique situation lowers your risk, optimizes production and optimizes workplace safety. That's why That's the key takeaway from our post. Not just that you pick the right caster, but that you pick the right caster because picking the wrong one will increase your risk and hinder production and endanger workplace safety. That's the conclusion. Now, onto our call to action. The call-to-action, of course, is the imperative or the command that tells our reader what to do. By now. Call today for your free quote. Take your free trial now, these are all sentences that call our reader to take an action. In most B2B blogs, the call-to-action is never to buy anything. It is more commonly to take the next step in the buyer journey. That might be to take a product demo. It might be to download a white paper. It might be to read a case study or book, a free consultation. In our case, we are using this blog post to generate leads. We want readers to give us their names and e-mail addresses in exchange for something of value. So we're offering a free guide. So we end our post with a call to action. If you need help sourcing the right type of casters to dissipate static electricity in your facility. Read our free guide, the smart buyers guide to anti-static Castillo manufacturers. Readers click on the link and arrive at a landing page where we give them the guide in exchange for their contact details. And this brings up a vital point when it comes to writing B2B blog posts. Every call to action you use in your blog posts should offer something of value. Don't just ask your readers to book a consultation. Ask them to book AT consultation and receive are complimentary. Checklist. Don't just ask readers to read our case study. Tell them, learn how to reduce your production costs by 18%. By reading our case study, you get the idea. Don't just tell your readers what to do next. Tell them why. Give them an incentive, a reward, a compelling and attractive reason for taking the action that you desire. Blog posts that end with a compelling offer. 10. Finalize Your Title: When you write a B2B blog post, the last thing you write is your title. Only after you have written your entire post. Are you ready to finalize your post title? After all, when you start writing, you only have a working title in mind. You interview your subject matter experts and you outline your post based on a tentative post title. But you should expect that you're working title is going to change slightly based on how you write your posts. For example, you're working title might be the top six ways to pay less corporate tax. But once you get to the end of your post, you realize you've actually listed eight ways because you thought of a couple more. So you need to tweak your title and change that six to eight. The thing to remember is that you only finalize your title after you have finalized your post. Let's return to the post that you and I have just written. Our working title going into this assignment has been, and here it is again, you've heard this a few times on this course. Understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. That was our tentative working title. You'll remember that our title contains the keyword phrase we are targeting in this post, namely anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. So when it comes to finalizing our title, we want to keep this keyword. If we want buyers to find our post, we want to keep this keyword in the title, but we can tweak the title if we want. For example, one rule of optimizing post titles for search is to place the keywords at the front. That way they are more likely to show up in search results on the screen. That is, as you can see, if you put the keywords too close to the end of your post titles, Google and other search engines truncate them. They cut them off on the screen when they display search results. To get them to show up in search results, put your keywords near the front of your title. For example, we can tweak our title instead of writing. Understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. We take the keyword phrase from the end of the title, and we put it at the start. Like this. We insert a colon and we add a benefit like this. Now, our blog post title reads anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. That's the keyword. Understand the difference. And this is a look at how each title will appear in a Google search. As you can see, the revised title displays all of our keyword phrase, while the original version truncates it at the end. Then there are other ways we can tweak our title. For example, in our post, we compare and contrast these two types of casters. We describe each one and then we described the advantages and disadvantages of each. So if we want to, we can tweak our title like this, anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels, advantages and disadvantages. Or we can write the title like this, anti-static caster wheels versus ESD, caster wheels, pros and cons. Or we could write it like this. Anti-static castle wheels versus ESD caster wheels compared. You see what I mean? By the time you get to this point in writing your post, all that you are really doing is finalizing, tweaking, improving your working title. You would likely only have to give it just a little tweak here, a little tweak there. You only need to tweak the SEO value or tweak a word to make your title more compelling or more clear for your target audience. This leaves the one last job you have before you hit Publish, and that is optimizing your post for search. That is the subject of the next and final lesson. 11. Optimize Your Post for Search: The last thing you should do before you publish your B2B blog post is make sure it is optimized for search. Your post is only useful to your potential clients and your company. If your potential clients can find your post and they are only going to find it if it ranks somewhere on the first few pages of search results. To rank there, you must optimize your post. For search engines, here's how you do that. Start with your post title. Your post title must contain the keyword or phrase that you are targeting. We are targeting the search phrase. And here it is again, anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. So our post title contains that keyword phrase as well. Next, optimize your page title. The page title appears in search results, but not in your post. The page title is what searchers see in search results. You create your page title separate from your post title. Your page title tells search engines what your page is about and your post title tells search engines what your post is about. As you can see from our post manuscripts, we are telling the web designer or the person who enters our text into our blogging platform, that our page title and our post title are different. As you can see, our page title features our search term only anti-static caster wheels versus ESD caster wheels. It is short and to the point and optimized for search. But our post title is much longer. Understand the difference between anti-static caster wheels versus EST, caster wheels. It is also optimized for search, but it is also written for humans. Most blogging platforms let you assign a page title and a post title that are different. Those that don't offer this function default to your post title. In other words, they take your post title and then make that your page title. The key thing to remember about your page title, that this is what search engines display in search results. They don't display your post title. They display your page title. Your page title is what you must optimize for search. You write your post title for your readers and you write your page title for the search engines. Next, write your Meta description. The Meta description is an HTML tag that you use to describe the content of a webpage or the topic of a blog post. This description shows up below the title and URL of your page as it appears in search engine results. The meta-description is also invisible on your post. It only shows up in search results. This is what it looks like. And you can see it appears beneath the page title. You need to accomplish three things with your Meta description. One, you must put your search keyword near the front so that your readers see that your post is relevant to what they are searching for. Two, you must give your reader a reason to read. Use phrases like learn, discover, save, reduced costs so that your readers see a clear and compelling reason to click on your post. Three, and finally, do all of this in fewer than a 155 characters with spaces. As you can see, if your meta description is too long, Google cuts it off at the end and doesn't display it in search results. To get the most value from your meta-description, make it include your keyword, make it compelling, and make it visible in its entirety. Next up for SEO is your opening paragraph. The generally accepted wisdom is to include your keyword in the opening sentence, or at least early on in the first few sentences, as we have done here with our posts. You should also optimize your headings. Include your keyword or synonyms for your keyword or long tail versions of your keyword in your headings. As you can see, we feature our keyword and variations of it throughout our post in the introduction, in the heading for each type of Castor and in the heading that introduces our table. Your post to get maximum SEO value should contain both external and internal links. External links point to industry websites, third-party sources, trade publications, and other objective sites outside of your website that do not offer competing solutions as yours. Here's an example of an external link. Here in our introduction we discuss electrostatic discharge. We create a link to a trade publication that has a glossary of caster terms and jargon. And we optimize the link for search by using the keyword term electrostatic discharge as our anchor text. Internal links point to web pages on our site and other posts on our blog. There are really only two things you should link to internally in your post. Resources that further educate your site visitors and pages that offer your products and services. You include the first type of link to nurture your leads. And you offer the second type of link to generate sales. And inquiries. Here, under the discussion about static electricity is a link to a post on our blog about the best casters to use for clean rooms and medical areas. We optimize the link for search by using the keywords Clean rooms and medical areas in the anchor text. Here, further down under the section where we discuss conductive caster wheel pros and cons. We feature a link to one of our product pages where we sell the biblical 50 millimeter a electrically conductive TPR swivel casters. And we optimize the link for search by using the product name in the anchor text. Finally, we include our target keyword throughout our post. We feature it enough times to boost SEO, but not so many times that Google penalizes us for keyword stuffing. Follow these SEO best practices, and you will optimize each post you write for search. You will help search engines understand what your posts or a boat and rank you higher. And you will help your potential customers find your posts when they search for the answers that your posts supply. That's when, when, when you rank higher in search, your customers find and read your posts and you generate more leads and win more deals.