As a web design co with a penchant for search engine optimisation (SEO), we looooove blogging at Studio Cotton – it’s one of the most reliable ways to attract a whole load of website traffic to your small business website.
SEO is all about optimising your website to rank higher and more often in search engine results (usually Google), meaning more website visits – which you really wanna get if you want to sell more of your wares or services.
Google really loves a regularly-updated website, with lots of words that are structured properly on lots of pages (especially if they answer specific queries) – and guess what? Blogging can do all of these things and more.
That was a very brief description, but you can learn about those things in more depth in Studio Cotton founder Aime’s blog post: Here are 11 reasons WHY blogging boosts your SEO.
However, we really do know that small business owners don’t usually have the time to write thousands of words every month.
You’ve got the expertise, experiences, opinions, recommendations and all that jazz that makes a good blog post, but you might just need an extra pair of hands when it comes to turning those thoughts into engaging, entertaining, SEO-rich blog articles.
That’s where ghost writers, content producers, and copywriters come in – they are experts in strategy and lovely words, and they can work with you to create authentic, super-readable blog content.
Writing blog posts for our clients and the Studio Cotton website is my main job as Studio Cotton’s content producer. Below is my dream way to be briefed to write a blog post, and how I’d love you to brief your blogging ghost writer.
I love a document. I actually can’t get enough of them. Some of you might think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m genuinely not. They’re so handy for referring back to during a project when you’ve forgotten a detail or got sidetracked and gone on a tangent.
These guidelines are important so that your writer doesn’t spend ~4 hours writing a blog post, only for it to have 1.5 hours worth of edits or (even scarier) needing to completely start over.
11 items on this list might seem like a lot to go over, but most of them can be brief bullet points, and some will apply to every blog post (meaning you can do a sneaky copy-paste).
1. The title of the blog post
Often, as a small business owner, you have all the knowledge, but don’t know how to organise it into a logical and useful blog post.
You might not have a specific title in mind, so a brief outline like “10 indie shops in Bristol” or “how to reupholster a chair” is a fine starting point, especially as many ghost writers have experience in blogging strategy, and will be able to transform your title into something SEO-tastic and clickable.
And if they can’t, they should check out How to write great blog titles with our NASALS mnemonic.
Having a title that matches search terms and answers a question for the reader is great for SEO. The blog post title should be a subject that is relevant to your business, which will be a good way to both seamlessly add in your SEO keywords and answer queries.
2. The main message/points for the blog post
This may be clear from the title, or might become obvious as your ghost writer is writing, but if you have a specific message or important points that need to be included, it’s great to have that mapped out from the get-go.
So for example, in the blog post 9 easy edits to minimise SEO-killing duplication across your product descriptions, the main message is that duplication is bad for SEO, and Aime briefed me with the main points of how to avoid doing that.
3. The purpose of the blog post
Although related, this is slightly different from the main message – is the purpose of this blog post to inform, to educate, to entertain, to advise, to reassure, to build community, to build trust and credibility..?
Making sales shouldn’t be top priority here – we don’t like salesy blog posts. Hard sells are a bit icky, and often don’t answer the queries that people are typing into search engines. That’s not to say you can’t mention your products/services, but don’t make it the sole focus.
4. Some context about you/your business
It’s important to include a little info about who you are and what your business is for every blog post, as many readers will be coming straight from Google and won’t know you – scroll back up and you’ll see how I did it for this blog post 😉
Give your blogging ghost writer some context about your small business so the reader can understand your expertise, your unique viewpoint, and why they should read and trust this blog post.
5. Who is your ghost writer writing as?
Who your ghost writer will be writing as usually depends on how big your business is, or who the main voice belongs to.
If it is just you, it would make the most sense for the ghost writer to write as if they are you – your audience will already have built a relationship with you, and it may be jarring to read a blog post from someone they’ve never heard of.
If your business is made up of a team, the ghost writer could write the blog post as if they are a generic team member – they don’t need to sound like a specific person, and can use terms like “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me”.
We generally recommend writing as a single person (or “I”) whenever possible, as it helps the reader build trust with a real person, not a faceless brand or worse: ChatGPT slop (pssst, read Aime’s blog post How to spot a ChatGPT blog: 13 tell-tale signs).
6. Your core brand SEO keywords & any blog-post-specific SEO keywords
SEO keywords are words or short phrases that relate to your small business, and ideally, when someone searches for one or more of them, your website would pop up in the results. Aime wrote this very helpful blog post – The easiest way to pick and use your brand keywords – if you’re not sure what your SEO keywords should be.
Here’s Aime’s SEO keyword advice in Instagram form if you prefer that to reading a blog post (although the blog post obvs goes into more detail, so I would recommend giving it a read when you can).
View this post on Instagram
It’s really handy to keep your keywords in a document for yourself and anyone else who might be doing any work for your business, whether it’s on the website, social media, admin… anything that involves words, really.
Once you have that doc, it’ll be really easy to copy and paste them into the briefing document for your blogging ghost writer.
You’ll want to add in a few keywords that are hyper-specific to the blog post at hand too – for example, my keywords for this blog are “ghost writer” and “blogging,” alongside Studio Cotton’s regular ol’ core keywords.
7. Your brand’s tone of voice
While your ghost writer might not have to try to sound like a specific person, it is important to match the tone of your small business.
This part of consistent branding can sometimes be overlooked in small businesses, especially if you’re the only member of the team – you’re probably not thinking about the tone, and just writing as yourself!
It’s super helpful to have a tone of voice (TOV) document that you can share with blog ghost writers and copywriters, as well as anyone who may work on your website or social media content. You can pop your core SEO keywords in this too, if you like, and just link to it within the briefing document.
A ghost writer can create a TOV document by looking through the current content on your website and social media, but it adds a bunch of time that you may not want to be paying for. We do this for our blogging clients, but it’s built into the price of our blogging packages.
It doesn’t have to be a super in-depth document – an overall vibe (e.g. friendly, silly, soulful, matter-of-fact, etc) and examples of words and phrases already in use on their website and social media platforms is all we gather into Core Documents for our blog clients, as well as their no-nos.
What you don’t say is a great starting point for a brand TOV document, as Aime laid out in this post on Instagram.
View this post on Instagram
8. Any external links you want to include in the blog post
External links are great for SEO because it helps Google build more context for what your website is about.
The more your site is interlinked with other relevant sites, the more evidence Google has to rank your website highly. It also gives you a higher chance of being spotted by customers and suppliers who can see your website sending them new visitors.
If you have other small business pals that you’d like to link to, know the best places to get supplies for whatever the blog post is about, etc., let your ghost writer know.
Equally important – let them know any websites you don’t want to link to! I quite often add links into blog posts to add more context, and knowing the websites that my client never wants to link to saves faffing about with amends for both of us.
9. And any internal links you want in the blog post too
Internal links are great for SEO too, because they help keep someone interacting with your content by pointing them to the next blog post, page, or product. The higher the engagement on your website, the better the impact on SEO.
You know your website content better than anyone, so if there are relevant blog posts, pages, or products that would be good to slip seamlessly into a blog post, make sure to add them to your blogging brief.
10. Any specific call(s) to action
Do you have something specific in mind that you’d like your readers to do once they’ve finished reading this blog post? For example…
- sign up to our newsletter
- DM or follow us on Instagram/other social media site
- browse the “new in” section of our online shop
- read another related blog post
- download a free resource related to the blog post
- check out this new product we want to shout about
- or a workshop that you want people to sign up to
We don’t reeeeally want to end a blog with “And now buy this” (throwback to the hard salesiness I mentioned in point 3) as it can leave a reader feeling like they were deceived into reading a sales pitch, rather than insights from someone looking to share info & help.
11. The deadline for the blog post
It’s super helpful to have a deadline of when you want the blog post to be published. You and your ghost writer will then be able to work out when to send the first draft, giving time to do any amendments.
It’s worth also including whether the work will end with the final draft, or whether you want them to add it to the website too (in which case you’ll need to organise logins for them as well at some point).
For our recurring blogging clients, the deadline is usually the end of the month, but occasionally the date is brought forward to meet the release of a new product or service, and it’s important to know this as early as possible.
By the way, if you’re looking for your content to be found around a specific time, aim to publish it approx 6 weeks before so that Google has time to discover, crawl, and index it. Yep, that does mean posting Valentine’s Day content as soon as Christmas is over.
Utterly shameless self-promotion
We wanna turn your expertise, experiences, & advice into traffic-boosting blogs too
If you’re enjoying this article, just think how much your audience would love yours. With strategy, topics, SEO keywords and oh-so-many words – you just gotta check out our SEO blogging service.
Schedule a video call with your ghost writer
So that’s your ghost writer brief covered, but I wanted to add this in as an important step before the writing can begin.
A video call that can be recorded is the best way to dump all the information on your blog writer – a lot of people speak better than they write, plus your blogging ghost writer can ask you questions, and the conversation may spark further ideas too.
You’re the expert in your business/field, so your input is vital – your ghost writer might not be familiar with your industry at all, so the more info you can give (and less research the writer has to do for themselves), the better.
It’s also best to assume that whoever is reading your blog doesn’t know much (if anything) about your business and industry, so detail and knowledge is really important.
At Studio Cotton, we use Google Meet for our client calls, which can also provide a transcript – another written document that I find super helpful to refer back to, especially when I’m in the office and don’t want to play video out loud.
Make sure you come to the call prepared – refer back to the briefing document you created for your blogging ghost writer, and make any notes you might need before the call to make sure everything is covered and your ghost writer has everything they need to get going on your blog post.
Optional: images for the blog post
This is usually only if your blogging ghost writer is adding the blog post to your website, although even if they’re not, sometimes images can help add context during the writing process.
Photos and images make blog posts more visually stimulating, and can inject personality and context – which is super important when it comes to your website visitors getting the most out of your blog content.
It’s handy for ghost writers to know if they need to source any further imagery too – for example, if you want a blog post about Bristolian pubs with fireplaces and you only have photos of 3 of the 10 pubs, your ghost writer may need to factor in sourcing those images.
If you have specific imagery that would work for the blog post, send it over to your ghost writer – I prefer these to be in a shared Google Drive folder, but there are lots of ways to send them. I would avoid WeTransfer as they put a time limit on downloading, which can be easily missed.
You get brownie points if those images are already optimised, otherwise that’s another thing your blogging ghost writer will have to do, potentially adding extra time onto that precious invoice. Images need to be optimised for websites, otherwise they can seriously slow it down and negatively impact your SEO.
If you’re not sure how, read 5 super quick steps to manage your website images and improve your SEO, and check out our click-along £3 image optimisation tutorial for Mac users.
Also, if the images are taken/created by someone else, you need to get permission to use them first, or you’ll be in deep doodoo, as it’s illegal.
Phew, ok, that was a bit longer than I intended. If you got this far, let me reward you with this video of cute kittens.
And if you want someone to write your blog posts for you, check out our… nah just joking, you know I’d never end an article with a sales pitch.
But if that somehow wasn’t enough blog chat, check out the blogging section of the Studio Cotton blog for more tips, and follow @studio.cotton on Instagram for bitesize advice on all things websites.
