5 Blogging Strategies for Teacher Sellers

Kirsten 0:01

you're listening to the creative teacher podcast, a show for busy teachers looking for ways to engage, inspire and make an impact in their teacher businesses. I'm Kiersten, a teacher business owner who is all about simple and actionable tips, strategies and resources that result in wins, big or small. If you're looking for that extra spark of creativity, you've come to the right place. Let's dive in together.

Hey there and welcome to another episode of the creative teacher podcast. As you can tell my voice is a little bit very gone today. And I'm just going to truck through it because this is a remix episode, so you won't be hearing my scratchy voice. I hope that you are having a wonderful March so far. This episode is all about blogging. I created this episode A while back a couple years ago, but I think there's still some really great tips. So without further ado, let's go ahead and listen to that remix episode.

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Are you wanting to start a blog. So the first thing you'll need is a blogging platform. I recommend starting with WordPress and Kajabi. Those are really popular ones that I know of that a lot of teacher printers use. But wicks and Squarespace are great starter alternatives. There is a lot more capability and customization with WordPress and Kajabi though WordPress is a little trickier to get the hang of but there are plenty of themes you can use and buy that will make your blog and website look fantastic. You can also hire out for any blogging platform if you're already feeling overwhelmed with the tech setup, which can be pretty overwhelming I know for sure, and also how to get it together. This can be a really valuable investment for your business.

All right, so next step is thinking about planning and batching content for your blog. I'm a huge fan of batching content as you if you remember from my previous episodes, especially in Pinterest is the batching love it. I did it Wait a whole week to batch my blog posts every month. And it's such a great feeling to be able to schedule everything and be able to focus on other aspects of my business, such as creating TPT products, or creating social media posts, or designing for my clients. When you're planning First, decide how often you want to publish your blog posts. Do you want to release a post every week? Or do you want to release the post every two weeks, my recommendation would be publishing a new post and sharing it with your audience every single week. This is a really great way to show up with consistent and valuable content. As you're building a following and an audience who will know like and trust you with all of the content and informative help that you have to offer about your topic that you share. Then decide on how often you want to write your blog posts. Do you have time to write it every week? Or would you rather batch each month or knock it out in a quarter, I am a month person I love to batch out my content each month. And I'll tell you about my routine of how I do it. Now here is the fun part. So your third step is to brainstorm topics. You might have heard of content pillars, or content buckets. These are just categories or main topics that you share with your audience. Decide on what topics you want to mostly focus on. So I always seem to come up with math things, math examples, but here we go again, let's say I had a math TPT store. One content pillar I could share are the best practices of teaching math. Then another pillar would be math mini lessons. Another one would be math stations, then I could have math intervention, and then math assessment. So think about maybe at least three to five content pillars that you could rotate through. And then from there, you're going to brainstorm a list of weekly blog post topics in each content pillar. So if one of my content pillars are math stations, I could come up with the following topics. I just brainstorm these took me about a minute to do, how to start the year right with math station routines and expectations, top five station activities to practice fluency maximizing small group time during stations. And then digital station activities for distance learning. So that is right there. That's a whole month of topics to write about, you can either rotate your pillars each month, so do a different pillar each month. Or you can have some kind of monthly theme such as the one I have for you this month. You can keep your blog posts topics in a Word document, or can use air table or any other place that you can refer back to. I am pretty simple. And I just use my phone. So basically, all my blog post ideas are in my notes app. That's all I have. So whenever I come up with an idea wherever I am, I could just add it to the list. So that's a really great way that i How's it it works for me.

All right. Now let's talk about key elements to a great blog post. There are three key elements that I'm going to share with you. One element is that your blog post is informative. One way to do this is sharing five hacks or four steps in your blog posts. No longer are those blog posts that are sharing what your stations were like for the day and who was you know, who was on task and all of that kind of stuff, or how the first week of school went, people are looking for tips and information. So make sure it is informative. Second key element is that your format and language are on point, you want to have a lot of whitespace. So keeping your paragraphs short and brief. So maybe three to four lines at a time, then you just space it out, highlighting words or phrases in bold to emphasize certain key points. And for those skimmers who don't really read because, to be honest, most people really don't fully read the posts or most people are skimming the end for the information that's important to them. Another thing about the language would be to keep it light and friendly as if you're talking to a friend kind of like what I'm doing right now. Make it easy for your readers to skim. That's just really a big thing to note. And a third key element is breaking your blog post apart visually with photos that would fit your brand so looking at the style of photos use for your business, find those, add those in, you can find them at pixels or Unsplash. There's a ton of stock photos that you can use that are attribution free. And then you can also take screenshots or mock ups or photos of your actual products or your classroom, depending on what the blog post is about. So those are the three key elements, it needs to be informative, proper formatting and language, and then breaking it apart visually with photos.

The last part to blogging with brilliance is to market your blog post and share it with others. And then you also can market your own TPT resources using your blog. So we'll talk about that second thing first. One way to market your TPT resources using blogging is to tie in a lead magnet in your blog post. So if you were here, for last Monday's blog post, we talked about getting people on your email list. Adding a relevant lead magnet at the end of your blog post is a really great way to get subscribers. But you don't want to just bam, sign up for my lead magnets, you want to weave it into your blog post that you are writing. Most of your blog posts should not be hard sell posts. But if you can soft sell and find ways to weave in your free or paid product, you'll get a lot of traction, you'll get a lot of you'll get a lot of traffic to your TPT store.

So I'll give another example. So one of the blog post ideas that I came up with was were top five station activities to practice fluency. So I could mention those top five station activities, which happened to be something that I have as a TPT product, maybe I have some fluency station activities, and I highlight five of those. So at the end of the blog post, after I've shared my top five station activities, I can say, well, you can get all of these station activities in one awesome TPT resource you can find, you know, so you can always word that. But that's just one way to tie it in. So you just kind of you ended off like, what's next? What, okay, I see the top five station activities, what can I do next? How can I get something like this all in one, and then that's when you pitch your product. So that's just one way to market your TPT resources with your blog, then there's another thing you can do with your blog. And that's to share it out to other people. And the best thing to do is to send an email to your subscribers, when a new blog post drops.

Something else you could do is to create pins and pin it on Pinterest, you can also share it make a Facebook post or stories or reels. So have it on Instagram, Facebook, and then have a call to action at the end of your poster story is to check out your blog post and go to your website. So you can say something creative to get them to click on your link in the bio.

For me, the biggest traffic from Instagram is not to my TPT store. It's actually to my blog, I get the most traffic to my blog through Instagram, like that's the highest platform that people go off of from Instagram. I want to share with you how I brainstorm that market and share my blog posts for you. This is what I do. At the end of the quarter, I start to put together my topics for the next few months. So I don't have it all written out. I just have my blog post topics that I'm gonna write about. And I come up with a theme based on what product or courses or services that I plan to market in that month. Then I look at my blog post topic bank to see what I have, or what would fit with my monthly theme. I set aside one week a month to batch my blog posts for the following month.

So I have a whole week dedicated to blogging. Day one will be where I outline and draft my blog posts. Day two, I'm going to record all my audio and video, which is what I'm doing at the time of this recording is recording all of my month's blog posts. So on days three and four, I'm going to just be focusing on revising and editing and uploading both the written and audio versions of my blog posts. And I always upload that into Kajabi. So I always once I'm done revising and editing my written blog posts in my audio or video blog posts, I just go ahead and upload it in the platform so that it's ready. Day five this would be creating I blog graphics, and adding photos to my blog posts. So I will go on pixels or Canva. Or just go in my file of the photos that I have if it's for my own products, I'll add those into Kajabi. So I'm adding, I already have the written text, I already have the audio, and then I'm just adding in pictures and other SEO stuff that is necessary. I also take the time to make sure that I'm bolding emphasizing in bold certain words and phrases, and then just cleaning up any text that needs to be cleaned up or taken. And then the last day, we're at day number seven, six, or seven, just depending on how long it takes me is to batch and schedule emails, directing to my weekly blog post. This usually takes about a day. And then I'll just quickly make any last changes before I start to schedule them. So I schedule my emails I scheduled my blog posts to be released at a certain time each week, so that it's all put together and tied, and I just can set it and forget it. And this usually takes me about a week to do. And once it's done, it is done for the month, it's so great to be able to not have to worry about if a post is going to be released, or if an email is not going to be sent. It's already scheduled. And I use ConvertKit to type and schedule my email. So it's a really great platform that I trust in us to do. I also share my new blog posts on Instagram Pinterest in in my Facebook group. So I will go in there and also share Hey, my blog my new blog posts is out then people can always go and check it out there.

All right, here's your action tip for today. It's short and sweet. Decide on whether or not blogging is a great asset to your business and see what you can do to get started. Or you can check out my tips on how you can improve your blogging game. If you already have a blog. Do you need to be posting more frequently? Do you need to be marketing it more frequently or incorporating your TPT products? Decide what works for you what you could do to enhance your blog if you already have one.

All right, well, that is the end for today. I would love to hear what you think about this blog post and episode, DM me on instagram as always at the southern teach, and then post a story and tag me on your biggest takeaways and aha moments from this week. I would love to be able to share your feedback on my own stories and talk to you about it and if you have any questions, so I cannot wait to hear from you as always. Well that's the end for today. I hope you have an amazing day.

Thanks for tuning in to the creative teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode, feel free to subscribe and leave a review. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I cannot wait for you to join me in the next episode for more tips and inspiration. Have an amazing day.