A blog is a fantastic way to get a deeper level of engagement with your audience and drive that all important traffic to your site. It makes perfect commercial sense for businesses to capitalise on an ongoing dialogue with their audience – building up customer retention, loyalty and humanising their brand.
It can also be really hard!
Writing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and some would even say that its...wait for it…a CHORE (sacrilege)
But, if you’re new to blogging, writing your first blog post doesn’t need to be onerous if the subject is something that you (hopefully) know something about – YOU.
If you’ve got a strong business proposition, product or service then it’ll speak for itself, right? Sometimes that’s true. But most of the time you need to speak for your product through your brand – and the best way to speak for your brand is through your blog.
A decent blog not only gives depth and relevance to your business but gives you the opportunity to tell a story. Storytelling provokes an emotional response, providing you with another way of connecting with your audience. And what better story to start with than your own!
So without further ado, I would like to introduce the story of me.
I’m Caroline, and I’m the Carrie in carrie creates.
I’m not often called Carrie anymore, but it was a childhood nickname given to me by my oldest friend, and childhood next door neighbour – so for me it only has good connotations.
Endless summers playing in each other’s gardens via a secret gap in the hedge that only we could squeeze through, rambling over the fields to the abandoned manor house that we probably shouldn’t have been trespassing in (it was the eighties, I need say no more) and many other wholesome and entirely eighties appropriate activities before we all became obsessed with tablets and apps.
Anyway, enough Famous Five. I’ve always loved to write. From creating little books with illustrations as a child, to my daily rantings in my teenage diary. Writing has always played a big part of my life and as an adult I always tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to incorporate some form of writing into my jobs (even if sometimes the job didn’t exactly require it)
My career background is primarily in heritage and museums. All the best stories are preserved in history so interpreting those across a variety of mediums – social media, print, digital – and creating content around those stories was a massive privilege and really shaped my future path.
I had a short spell in education when my children were small – I think it’s safe to say that places of work with traditional hierarchies are probably not my best fit…
I started to plot my escape from my school-jail hell and ended up managing a magazine franchise and associated regional website/social media pages. It’s here I learnt about SEO, blogging, social media management, content creation and a whole host of other useful skills that would lead me to my current freelance writing gig.
And the rest is history.
I think it’s safe to say it took me triple the amount of time to write the beginning of this blog post than it did the second part.
So, if you need some inspiration, you don’t need to look very far – just start with yourself.
If you need some help to gain mastery of your blog why not get in touch and we can chat through some ideas.