3 Things to Always Include in Your Tennis Blog Content

What do you do when you get ready for a tennis match? You check if you have all your tennis gear in place before stepping on the court. The same principle applies when you write a blog post. You go over a checklist and make sure it has all the essentials in place. If you are blogging for the purpose of promoting a business or as a mean to create an extra income, the following three critical elements should always be included in your tennis blog posts.

1. The solution to a problem 

Every day your potential readers are searching the web for content, trying to find answers to the questions that keep them up at night. The simple formula to writing popular blog posts is to find those questions, the pain points of your audience, and write an excellent blog post that provides a solution to them. If you are able to do that, people will not only find your content useful but will also share it with their friends, family, and colleagues. 

Step one - find out their pain point 

So, how do you find out the best content to write about? 

As we have said in probably 90% of our own blog posts, the first step involves understanding your audience. You must know really well who you are writing for. That is the most important part. Listening to your tennis students, tennis clients, colleagues, and customers and see what information they are searching for. It is a best practice to develop a detailed description of your ideal reader (your marketing persona). 

What are some of the issues the audience goes through? What is the thing they wish they can improve? If you are not sure, there is no harm in asking. Reach out to some of your tennis customers and ask them. You can also make a survey or create a comment box at your tennis facility. Searching in online forums such as Reddit, private Facebook groups, and in the comments sections of websites or tennis blog posts, is another way to find what information people are searching for. 

Step two - take away their pain (provide a solution)

Of course, merely knowing the pain points of your potential readers is not enough for a successful tennis blog.

Readers love advice, tips, and resources that will help them with whatever they are struggling with at the time. 

Let's say you own a website where you sell tennis rackets. Many beginner and intermediate players would look for information on the right racket to buy, what the size of their grip is, what strings tension to use. What do they do in this case? They search online for the answer. Providing a solution to these questions in your blog is how people will find you, read your content, and if it is interesting and educational, they will come back for more. 

2. An actionable tip

What does “actionable tip” mean? In short, blogs should tell the readers what to do next. You want people to leave your content and do something that makes them feel productive and improve their life. If they are able to do so, that means they understand your content and know what steps to take to solve a problem or complete a task.  

By offering such an actionable tip you make the theory into a specific how-to. 

For example, let’s say you are giving a student some tips to reduce double faults when playing tennis matches. You do not just say “make less double faults” or “practice your serve more”, right? That is too vague. You normally give very specific tips like “let’s work on putting more spin on your serve, by doing x, y, and z today, so we can increase consistency”. 

Additionally, you should use images and/or embedded videos, add highlights and arrows to break things down or emphasize what you are talking about. Adding detailed examples and steps, as we did above, as well as visuals, will help your story and make your blog tip more actionable. 

Tutorial-type of content should include all information needed to help your readers accomplish the solution we talked about in the first part of this blog post. Also, if you make a Youtube video and add a link to it in your blog post (and vice versa - add a link to your blog post in the description of your video), people will be more likely to find it. 

3. Appropriate keywords 

Even if you are new to blogging, you have probably encountered people talking about keywords, key phrases, long-tail keywords, etc. To get the most organic traffic to your tennis blog, you have to include the right set of keywords. Let’s go over a couple of keywords basics. 

What is a keyword? 

Keywords are the words someone types (or speaks - e.g. Siri) into a search engine. People use search engines for various things every single day. 

Finding the best keyword or key phrase to use in your tennis blog is about identifying what kind of searches your potential readers will be doing to find the answers to their questions (to their pain points). This matters a lot to us bloggers because even if your blog content is excellent and answers the questions your readers are asking, it would not matter if no one is able to search for it and find it. 

In order to find the right keywords, you must conduct keywords research. Keywords research identifies how often that word or phrase is searched for, its popularity, the level of difficulty, among other things. What are the keywords or phrases people would type in the search engine, to find a solution to their problem? Think of variations of what people would have to type. What other things connect to that piece of content.  

As a good time of thumb, you should focus on one or two key phrases in each one of your blogs.

There are many tools out there that can help with that. For example: 

• Google Keyword Planner
• Ubersuggest
• Moz Keyword Explorer 

What keywords to choose for your tennis blog:

Once you have a list of keywords and related keywords, you should try to narrow it down. Remove the ones that are a mismatch for your target audience (your potential readers). 

For example, if your blog post talks about match strategy tips for tennis players, your keywords research might end up pulling some related ones about fitness training. Although fitness training is usually part of tennis training, those keywords are likely way too general and not relevant enough to that particular blog post. Therefore, you should remove those from your keywords list.

If you are new to blogging, you should pay attention to keywords search volume. Search volume gives you an idea of how many people are searching for a particular keyword. It is also best to choose keywords with low search volume and try to get your blog post to rank high for those. 

Ultimately, you will fit the keywords into your content, not write your content around the keywords.  

What happens after you find some good keywords?

Once you have performed keywords research, you must utilize those keywords in your blog post by placing them in key places, such as the blog post title, meta description, headers, and copy. 

1. Have a healthy keywords density - that is typically around 1-2%, which means if your blog post is 1000 words, then your primary keyword should be used around 10 times. 
2. Write for humans - the copy must flow naturally and not be stuffed with keywords. 
3. Include your keywords in the first 100 words or so of your blog text.
4. Link to other blog articles - if you have other blog posts published, make sure you link to them. This improves your website hierarchy. 

As usual, keyword research becomes easier once you start to apply it. It is a timely process but it is worth doing it. 

Are you ready to write tennis blog posts that people want to read?

If you want people to read your content, you have got to make sure that all of your content provides a solution to a problem and it is as actionable as possible. 

So, go ahead and get started by finding and writing down three of your reader’s pain points. Once you know that information, offer a solution in your next blog article.

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