In the upcoming March edition of the collision industry’s leading social media channel “Collision Hub” asked me to do a guest expert article on blogging for body shops for their latest issue of “The Hub”. In that article I mention doing a demonstration of the inbound marketing process for body shops. Here is that demo:
DEMO Headline text goes here (be sure to use those keywords!!)
This is an example of a blog post for a body shop. You should write about topics like, the repair process, paint and finishes, how to spot a bad repair, how to pick a good shop, insurance questions, parts questions etc etc. You name it. And if you keep checking this blog we are going to be writing some blogs to help you with your own blogging, and inbound marketing.
Its also important to include a photo or two like this one:
When writing your copy, you need to remember that people are reading it on computer screens and will start to scan it if the copy is dense. When blogging, don’t get too hung up on what your teachers told you about paragraphs.
It is perfectly fine to break up your copy into little bite sized snippets like these. See how much easier this is to read?
Bold copy key points
Another readability tip is to bold out key points. If a reader is scanning your blog, you may want to call attention to certain areas. Think about the skimmers out there. What do you want them to glean from your post? This technique also draws in readers who were going to scan the article then found good stuff in there worth reading.
Break things out into lists
- Another tip for blogs is to make top 5 or top 10 lists.
- You will get a lot better response on “5 quick ___” articles. Consider your readers attention span.
- 5 quick tips to make my life better with (insert keyword here) is always worth a read.
- Be sure to use bolded and bulleted text.
- See how easy that was to read?
A couple of other important things I want to mention:
- We are going to redesign this website. It does the trick, but the blog is hard to read. Next version the blog page will simply be black text on a white background. Consider readability when building your blog.
- You can do a blog on an external site like blogger, but it will do nothing for your page ranking. In fact the more readers you get the more you will rank blogger. You NEED to keep your blog on your website. You dont want the traffic to leave your website if at all possible.
- We use a content management system called Hubspot to manage all of our client’s websites and blogs. It allows us to easily manage a client website but it also gives us amazing back end tools to manage web anylitics. For more info, contact us.
- Notice how this blog easily allows for social media sharing across the top. Readers can easily share this blog on their Facebook page, or re-tweet it.
- Every time I blog it automatically gets tweeted, sent to my linked in page and my company’s Facebook page.
And finally the key to the blogging step in the inbound marketing process is to end with a clear call to action button. This is a button which leads to an offer. It is what takes the visitors at the top of your sales funnel and identifies which ones are read to move to the middle of the sales funnel. This button offers them some free premium content in exchange for filling out a lead from. You fill these out online all the time, but never noticed you were moving your way down into a sales funnel.
