Blogging

Watching your business grow based on the steps and tactics you’ve implemented along the way is one of the best parts of being a business owner. Whether your blog just hit its page view goal for the month, you made a sale on your website, or you got a referral from a client, you’ve done it! But how can we keep pushing those goals further, make more money, and explore your passions even further? By using your website to its full potential! We’re big fans of Squarespace for all your website needs, and their various options and features make it so easy to keep pushing and trying new things. But it can be challenging to try new things if you’re unsure of the result (perfectionism is a curse sometimes!), and when it seems like you’re overflowing with options and business plans abound, the decision fatigue sets in, and then you ultimately do nothing. To get out of that rut, we’re figuring out which new marketing strategy you should implement based on your type of our favorite personality test, the Enneagram (it’s all about personality, rather than birthdays or charts). Grab your notebook and a pen, and start taking notes!

Grow Your Email List
Email is a powerful tool to keep in your back pocket. I mean, how many times a day do you check your own email? How often do you ooh and ah over a product, service, or link you found in a newsletter? Ones know the power of their words, and they’re often very intentional and strong. But they have a tendency to get caught up in all the little details and nuances, which can cause them to self-sabotage through perfectionism. Make it easy on yourself by using Squarespace’s built-in email campaigns, which pull directly from your site so your logo, products, and social links are there waiting for you.
When building out your emails, include lead generators and clickable content to keep your audience engaged and encourage new signups. Try free downloads, short mini courses, checklists, exclusive blog posts, product discounts, and more! 
READ: 8 Things You Should Do Before Hitting Send on That Email

Repurpose Old Content
Twos are friendly and smooth (charming at best), and they let that come through their content and business. You’ve spent so much time and effort on your website, so don’t let old posts and pages fall to the wayside as time goes on. As your audience grows, you want to make sure they’re able to access all of your content. Update popular posts from the past with new keywords and extra content and links. Write a post about work-from-home tips last summer? Add more photos and relevant topics and post again. This is also a good time to revisit previous projects and breathe new life into them. If you spent a lot of time on something at one point, keep repurposing it for your audience!
Create a content schedule using all of these reposts. Squarespace allows you to schedule posts in advance, so you can build out your content calendar for the weeks and months ahead. Take note of what types of content perform best based on the day of the week and time to help you keep your audience engaged and increase your click rate. 

Use Email Automation
Threes are excited when they can automate and streamline a process, and email is a great option that will save you ample time when you’re in the zone. 
We love the automations within Squarespace email campaigns that allow you to keep your site top of mind without having to send an individual email every time. Have an online store? Set up an automation that will email new customers a few days after their initial purchase, offering a discount code. A surefire way to turn first customers into repeat customers. Have a blog? Send out an automatic welcome email to new subscribers featuring some of your most-loved blog posts. The best part about creating these automations is that you can “set it and forget it.” A little work upfront and you can reap the rewards for months to come. 

READ: 6 Email Marketing Hacks to Double Your Traffic and Sales

Dive into Hashtags
Fours are creatively-driven, so they love sharing their projects, products, and more on social media. Want to show your masterpieces to more people? Get acquainted with hashtags. On Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, hashtags are a great way to group content and show it to as many people as possible. Search through the hashtags your audience is following and create a list that you can add to your own posts.
It also might be a good idea to create your own hashtags to group your content and encourage your audience to share their own similar images and posts! Try keeping sets of hashtags in a note on your phone, based on different content you post. That way no matter what you’re posting, you’re maximizing the number of people who will see it. 

Explore New Features
A five never lets a rock go unturned. They want to try and research everything they can, and it’s a big factor in their success—they get results! To keep your marketing strategy up to date, you’ll want to keep that same energy and make sure you’re trying every feature on the social platforms you use. Try Instagram Live, Reels, and IGTV, or Facebook Live and Stories. Did you know you can make “Pinterest Stories” too? Not only will these help the algorithms of these sites to show your content to more people, but your audiences might see a new side of your business, a product from a different angle, more of your personality, and more.
We love Squarespace’s tool, Unfold, that helps you create beautiful Instagram Stories, straight from your phone. 

READ: Work Smarter: 15 Ways to Improve Your Website and Business

Create A Stellar “About” Page
Sixes have a really strong handle on who they are, so they’re not likely to publish and work on projects they’re unsure about. But they aren’t always so good at talking themselves up! Make it a point to add a little extra bit of you to your business with a really solid about page on your website. Tell potential customers about your favorite movie, or how you got your start in your business. Explain why your product or service is unique. Readers and customers will be more willing to engage with your blog, site, or shop if they feel like they know you. Add photos, quick FAQ type questions, what you’re loving lately, and more. 
Not sure about where to start? Think about your story. Why did you start your blog or business? Share a bit about where you started and where you are now. Bring readers on the journey with you! 
Read: Why You Need a Website for Your Small Business

Go Behind-the-Scenes
People love your personality, seven! Part of the fun of being a business owner is all the behind-the-scenes stuff you get to do, and your readers and customers want to see all of that too. Give people an insight into your day-to-day: how you package orders, what your office looks like, your favorite office music to play, what your favorite products are. Give your brand a personality—and if a seven can do anything, it’s show their personality! 
To keep up with your branding, make your personality really matches the aesthetic of the brand. If you’re an outgoing and lively person, a black-and-white website filled with basic serif fonts won’t correlate. The good news? With Squarespace, there’s no need to have any experience coding or designing either—you can easily match your brand’s aesthetic without spending hours upon hours toying around with the design. Choose from Squarespace’s robust library of templates, fonts, stock images, and more to ensure your site reflects your personality and business mission.

READ: 8 Ways to Make Your Website Stand Out

Upgrade Your SEO
Eights love a good project, and optimizing your entire site for SEO is the perfect weekend activity to get your blog and/or business in tip-top shape. Do some research on what your audience is searching and what keywords are best to include to attract even more site visitors. Get specific in your data about when people are clicking on your site, what pages they’re reading the most, what device they’re reading on, what they’re commenting on—seriously, go deep into the data. Then, build your marketing strategy on that. It’s basically the most magical set-up an eight could ask for. 
Not a whiz with SEO? No worries. Squarespace builds SEO optimization right into its templates, so you don’t have to take an SEO course to understand exactly what to do. Steps such as automatically creating mobile versions of all of your pages that load quickly make it easy on you but efficient and effective for your business plan. Squarespace also includes free SSL certificates to notify search engines that your site is legit, so you’ll show up in more searches. We also love that Squarespace has built-in Google Analytics integration so you can easily track all of your stats and goals.
READ: Ready to Publish Your Website? Read This SEO Checklist First

Squarespace’s SEO Checklist

Try Promoting Social Content
Nines, you create content that deserves to be seen! Nines are usually the shyest of the Enneagram types, so they usually need a little boost of confidence every once in a while to keep their business thriving. And the same could be said about their content. Sometimes, you just need a little boost to get it seen by the right person to convert to sales, and a great way to do that is through promoting your Pinterest pins and Instagram and Facebook posts. This can be pretty low budget (anywhere from $5-15), but could boost your traffic immensely. This might help you gain new followers, sales, website clicks, and more.

This post is sponsored by Squarespace, but all of the opinions within are those of The Everygirl editorial board. More

I don’t know about you, but I’ve tried to start a blog about a million times. From all the way back in middle school when I made a custom Tumblr dedicated to Evan Lysacek (honestly thankful this was never published) to many, many graphic design blogs I almost launched over the past few years. Something trips me up every time: I don’t think my photography is good enough, I’m too caught up in agonizing over design decisions, I didn’t narrow down my topic far enough, and I have no idea what I really want to say. But these days, launching a blog doesn’t have to be a huge production. In fact, I’m positive you can do it all in a weekend (or less!). Thanks to our platform of choice, Squarespace, the design and setup of your blog will be a breeze. Which just leaves finding your niche and actually writing your initial posts. Sounds way more doable, right? Follow our five steps below and you’ll be launched in time for a celebratory glass of champagne on Sunday night. 

Pick your niche
Before you start building out your blog and writing your posts, narrow in on a specific area of expertise. What topics excite you? What do you want to write about and where do you feel you’ll add value? 
If you don’t know what niche or topic you want your blog to focus on, pull out a blank piece of paper and take a few minutes to write down everything you’re interested in. Seriously, write down everything that comes to mind. Then, look over your list and think about each item you wrote down. Why are you interested in that topic? What drew you to it? Do you have a lot of opinions surrounding it? Do you want to further your own knowledge regarding it? Remember that you can combine areas of interest as well—you might want to write about travel and fashion, so key posts could focus on what to pack, what you wore where, city-specific capsule wardrobes, etc.
It’s also helpful to recognize that your blog niche doesn’t have to stay the same forever. You might start out writing only about freelance career tips, but once you’ve cultivated an audience, find that you want to write more about yourself and your day-to-day life. Choosing an initial niche is helpful because it gives you (and your audience) a solid road map for where to start. 

Secure your domain + build out your site
Now for the fun part. Once you’ve narrowed in on your niche, it’s time to choose your blog name and template. It’s easy to get stuck agonizing over which name to pick, but my advice is to keep it simple. You can’t go wrong with blogging under your name—either just to get going or as your forever blog identity. A few things to keep in mind when choosing a name: 
Check that the domain for that name is available 
Check that any social handles you’ll need are available (Instagram, etc.) 
Do a google search to ensure no other blogs have a similar name. You want to make sure your readers will be able to find your specific site.
When you’ve landed on a name, it’s time to design your site. Squarespace is our platform of choice for websites and blogging—with beautiful, plug-n-play templates, you’ll be up and running in no time. Plus, you get a free domain name with any Squarespace annual plan. Win, win. 
The niche you decided on earlier will help determine what your site design should focus on. If you’ll be writing long-form posts with lots of emphasis on text and links, you’ll want a template that is easy to navigate, read, and explore and isn’t too image-heavy. If you’ll be blogging about your favorite recipes, you’ll want a template that lets you easily add ingredients and cooking instructions. If you’ll be blogging about your style, you’ll want an image-friendly template with space to add shopping links. And so on. 
Squarespace offers tons of pre-built templates with demo content in place to help you see how your blog might look when you’re finished. Start with one of their designated blog templates or browse all the templates and build something totally unique. 
Our favorite text-forward templates: Harman, Foundry
Our favorite image-foward templates: Souto, Brower, Stanton
Our favorite magazine-style templates: Haute, Rally, Skye

Pro-tip: Don’t get too hung up on the design initially. I’m a perfectionist (and a graphic designer) and sometimes I get so wrapped up in what something looks like that I spend way too long tinkering with it … and it never actually gets published. Luckily, Squarespace’s pre-built designs are already minimal and visually arresting, so there’s not much you’ll need to do. Don’t worry about having a logo just yet, update your site title and then use one of the hundreds of pre-loaded fonts in Squarespace to create a text-based logo that will work perfectly for your launch. Here, I used Bennet Banner for a striking, serif look. 

Write your first posts
Now that you have a site backend to work with, it’s time to start writing and uploading your posts. I prefer to write my posts directly within Squarespace so I can test how they will look with images, links, and text callouts. 
When writing your posts, keep your target reader in mind. What are they looking for? What are they coming to this post hoping to find? Think about these questions as you write each post to ensure that you’re presenting your information in a way that is helpful to your readers.
Design-wise, make use of visual hierarchy to organize the layout of your posts. Have you ever landed on a site or blog, saw a huge block of text, and just navigated away immediately? Same. Reading one long, never-ending paragraph can be daunting and you don’t want to lose readers before they even get started. Squarespace has built-in hierarchy for text, so all you need to do is label text you want bigger as “Heading” (either “Heading 1” through “Heading 4” based on your desired size) to create bigger, bolder text and draw your readers’ eyes. Break up your text with bold calls to action and tips. Add value with freebie downloads and further resources. 

Optimize for SEO
Once you have at least five posts ready to go (you’ll want to ensure that readers landing on your new blog have more than one post to read), optimize each post for SEO to take advantage of any organic Google searches for your topic. Key SEO features to add for blogging: 
Add SEO descriptions (also called meta descriptions) SEO descriptions are usually 300-500 words that describe your page to a search engine (like Google). Add your page description to all pages on your site and include keywords to get your pages in front of more people. 

Create custom blog post URLsYour URL is the exact address of a page that shows up in a search bar. Add keywords from the title of your post to your blog post URLs to ensure your posts are showing up in those keyword search results. 
For more SEO tips: 
READ: Ready to publish your website? Read this SEO checklist first.
READ: Squarespace’s SEO Checklist 

Launch! 
Now that your blog posts are in and your SEO is finalized, you are ready to launch your blog. Announce your launch on social media to get readers excited and be upfront about your posting schedule so they know when to tune in for new posts. Start by promoting the posts you already have uploaded within the site and start tracking how your audience is responding. What posts are getting the most views and engagements? What posts do readers seem the most excited about? As your blog grows, you’ll have more and more data to utilize to create the most interesting and helpful posts for your readers. 

Further reading from TEG:

This post was in partnership with Squarespace, but all of the opinions within are those of The Everygirl editorial board. More

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