? We are talking with Mike Allton, the award-winning blogger, speaker and author at The Social Media Hat in St. Louis. Mike works with bloggers and businesses to help them leverage every aspect of content marketing. He has tons of knowledge and a website full of resources that you need. Together we talk about everything you need to know about blogging basics. Biggest Takeaways You Don’t Want To Miss: How do you come up with new and relevant topics? The key is what NOT to write about. You need to write for a business and not from a personal perspective. If you’re doing a personal blog it’s fine to talk about things such as your dog Spot and what you had for dinner. However, when blogging for your business it needs to need to be useful. The content has to answer questions. Whenever you can keep track of your own questions and those will make the best blogs for your business. Do you need more blogs or better content? If you have genuinely good and evergreen content, you don’t have to blog 5 times a week. If your posts are great for your audience, for example, a list of all the dog parks in your area, you will get hits on that posts for months. And you also hit a target customer, a dog owner, and they may end up using your pet sitting or dog walking services. How much should you post? As a small business owner, you don’t have to have a set schedule. Honestly, most people won’t be sitting waiting for your next post. If you miss a post or only post sporadically it’s okay. Nevertheless, if you post good quality posts often, you will see an increase in business. It won’t go fast, but after several months you will see an impact. Equally important consistent and quality posts do help. How long should blogs be? In general, an average post should be between 750-1250 words. It should introduce a topic, discuss it with bullet points and have a closing. In other words, blogging basics are much just like the five-paragraph format that we learned in school. “Cheater posts” are really short and don’t take that long to write, typically about 250-500 words. They are short, sweet and easy to post. However, they can not be considered the optimal quality content that won’t show up that highly in search results. However, it does help to add to the value of your blog. In contrast is what Mike calls, “Pillar Posts” and they are Google search goal. Additionally, these posts are huge magnets for local search traffic and start at about 1250 words. Furthermore, these posts have a huge amount of content and take quite a while to create, but are well worth it. Show Highlights: The start of Mike’s blogging adventure, he loved writing and using social media. Yet, he struggled with finding the right content to draw in clients, but he was able to figure out exactly what to do. [1:20] You can define blogs by “shelf-life.” Some blog topics will only be relevant for a short amount of time, while others are “evergreen,” meaning their content will be relevant for years. [3:40] Pet sitters and dog walkers have a unique advantage for posts. You can write about “The Best Dog Walking Trails [in your city] and that gives you a huge advantage on your blog content. [8:00] How creating content helps draw business. Specifically, your business will benefit from creating quality posts consistently. While it will take time, but end up drawing traffic, leads and eventually customers to your business. In the same ways, the more you blog quality posts, the faster you will see results. After approximately 50 pieces of content created, that’s when you can see exponential growth.  [11:50] Blogging basics and the anatomy of a blog. Plus, how long should a quality post be?  [16:00] What is a “Pillar Post” and why do you need them on your blog? [20:00] Overall, suggestions for those of you who don’t like to write. First, try and practice writing. As a matter of fact, you may not like only because you think you’re not good at it.