7 Ways To Improve Your Painting Business Blog in 2020

Painting businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t.

57% of marketers say they’ve gained customers specifically through blogging.

If you don’t have a blog, it’s never too late to start;

and if you already do, let’s improve it!

Here are 7 ways to improve your painting business blog in 2020:

1. Keep Widgets And Sidebars To A Minimum

Widgets and Sidebars can be a nice addition to your blog, but at a certain point, adding them to the blog gets to be too much.

Sure, there are many things that widgets can do for your blog readers.

You can use widgets which will show people which of your blog articles are the most popular, which have the most comments, which are the most recent, etc.

The problem with having so many widgets and sidebars is that they add clutter to what your reader has to look at.

The more things that your reader has to look at, the harder it will be to get his or her attention focused on your blog.

[Related: 11 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Blog]

2. Know Who Your Audience Is

If you really want to be able to connect with your audience, it would be really helpful if you knew who your audience was.

Possibly more importantly, you want to know who you want your audience to be.

If you specialize in refinishing kitchen cabinets and do not spend any time doing any work with bathrooms, you would write for a kitchen cabinet refinishing audience.

Writing about bathrooms would be possibly a less good idea since it might get people the idea that you do that.

Of course, if you are looking to branch out into other fields of painting you may well want to start doing so by exploring it in writing.

Knowing who your audience is also means that you know the age range of who you want to be reading your blog, and other information like that.

After all, you wouldn’t write a blog for a 20 year old the same kind of blog you would write for a 60 year old.

Here’s a good video talking about how to get to know your audience.

3. Break Up Your Content With Subheadings

When you are reading a blog, it’s useful to have text that is easy on the eyes, so to speak.

One way to make sure that your vlog is easy enough to read is to break up the text with subheadings.

If you look at this very blog that you are reading, even though it’s all about improving your painting business blog, it’s not all one big wall of text.

Instead, it’s broken up into seven convenient sections, each of which serve a purpose and let the reader to take in the blog bit by bit.

The expression for when there is too much text with no breaks in it is ‘wall of text’ and it’s almost always not a good experience for the reader.

Here, for example, is a wall of text:

Even though there are only eight or so full sentences, it seems to go on forever because of how poorly it is formatted.

That same number of sentences would look so much better split up in a few sections, maybe even with a subheading to separate them.

 

4. Reach Out To Other Blogs

Another way to get your painting business blog to be better in 2020 is to reach out to other blogs.

You can start by finding the blogs that are related to the same kind of niche or niches in which you specialize.

You can then use some of the blogs you find as sources of research and link to them, and then contact them and offer your own blogs for their research.

By doing so you will get valuable backlinks — the other blogs will link to your blog articles, which will improve how it looks in a Google search.

The more and better quality backlinks you can get, the better off your painting business blog will be.

Here is a video guide to blogger outreach.

5. Keep A Regular Schedule

When you have a blog, one of the most important things you can do to improve is to make sure that you have a regular schedule.

That means that if you are committed to posting every Tuesday, there should be a post from you 52 times a year at minimum — every Tuesday.

There are some people who would have you think that it’s okay to just post whenever you feel like it or ‘inspired’ and this is no good.

Inspiration and the desire to write will come and go but a formal schedule will bring you the need to post that often, and with it will come the inspiration.

Even though it will be inspiration in the form of needing to meet that deadline that you impose on yourself, the alternative is much worse.

If you write twenty posts in one month and then write nothing for five months, your audience will be confused and upset.

It would be far better to spread those same twenty posts out over six months and keep consistent.

There are apps that can help you plan out a blog schedule, and if you like planning on paper, Amazon has many great paper planners like this one.

6. Keep A List Of Things To Blog In The Future

Since you’re going to have a schedule, the last thing that you want to do is to be pushed up against the schedule wall with no subject.

Meaning — you know that you have to publish a new article the next day but have no idea about what subject to cover in that blog.

The better thing for you to do is to always have a list of things about which you can blog and add to it when you think of ideas for the blog.

Here are our 101 blog post ideas for painting contractors!!

7. Actively Connect With Your Audience

At the end of the day, the blog you write is just another way that you have to connect with an audience.

The thing you should do to make sure you have that connection is to be active in it, and that means if they comment, you comment back.

If you get an email from them, write back — you want to meet the needs of your audience – it could be a future customer!

 

Quick Recap:

1. To make sure that people reading your blog aren’t distracted unnecessarily, keep widgets and sidebars to a minimum.

2. Write better blogs by focusing to a particular audience — know who your audience is.

3. Don’t subject your audience to a long wall of text by breaking up your content with subheadings.

4. To get good backlinks from related blogs, reach out to other blogs and link to their articles, asking them to link back to your original content

5. Your regular readers will appreciate it if you keep a regular schedule and not just post whenever you feel like it.

6. So that you don’t ever run out of subjects for your blog, keep a list of things to blog in the future.

7. Don’t leave your blog followers wondering if you will respond to their comments — actively connect with your audience and respond to comments, emails, etc.