Writing blogs for your beef farm diversification is one of the best ways to improve your online visibility and search engine optimisation. But coming up with ideas can be hard, so we have compiled a list of blog ideas to keep you going throughout the summer months.
As a beef farm business, there are a few different types of blogs you can write, so we have broken our blog ideas into blog types.
Recipe blogs are an extremely effective farm marketing tool for any business that produces food or drink products. As a beef farm business, you may find some customers struggle to think of recipes to use for less common beef cuts, or may get bored of common recipes. By creating recipes using your beef products, you can help customers try new products while also improving the visibility of your website.
Where possible, try to make your recipes as seasonal as possible. As summer is here, we have focused on BBQ ideas in this blog:
Beef Mince Nachos: Brown the beef mince and cook onions, then add the peppers. Then chuck in a homemade BBQ sauce. For the nachos, spread a layer of tortilla chips on a baking sheet. Sprinkle shredded cheese over the tortilla chips, followed by the beef mince. Drizzle some extra BBQ sauce over the beef shin and sprinkle additional toppings like sliced jalapeños, diced tomatoes, and chopped green onions. Add more cheese if you like it that way.
BBQ Beef Sausage Flatbread: Brush the flatbread dough with olive oil and place it directly on the grill grates. Cook for a few minutes until it starts to firm up. Flip the dough and top it with BBQ sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, sliced beef sausages, sliced red onions, and any other desired toppings such as bell peppers, mushrooms, or jalapeños. Close the grill lid and cook for another 5–7 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the crust is cooked through.
Coffee Rubbed Brisket: Prepare a coffee rub by combining finely ground coffee, brown sugar, paprika, chilli powder, salt, black pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder in a bowl. Rub the brisket all over with the coffee rub, ensuring it is evenly coated. Let it sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes to allow the flavours to penetrate the meat. Sear the brisket on both sides over direct heat on the BBQ for about 4–5 minutes per side to develop a nice crust.
Move the brisket to indirect heat, reduce the temperature to low, and close the lid. Slow-cook the brisket for about 5–6 hours. Remove the brisket from the grill, tent it with foil, and let it rest for at least 30 minutes before slicing.
Recipes help to sell your products by linking the recipe to a buy-ingredients option, but they can also be used to encourage customers to try ingredients they are unsure about. We find this particularly useful for meat producers who want to get a better carcass balance, as they can use recipes to teach their customers how to cook with less common cuts of meat or with offal.
BBQ Beef Shin Tacos: Slow cook the beef shin and on the BBQ and then remove it from the grill to rest. Then, shred the meat using two forks. Warm up corn tortillas and fill them with the shredded beef shin. Top the tacos with your favourite toppings, such as salsa, guacamole, diced onions, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime juice.
Korean BBQ Style Grilled Skirt Steak: In a bowl, create a marinade: whisk together soy sauce, brown sugar, sesame oil, grated ginger, minced garlic, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Marinade the skirt overnight. Remove the skirt steak from the marinade, allowing any excess marinade to drip off. Grill the skirt steak for about 3–5 minutes per side. Serve the grilled skirt steak Korean BBQ style with steamed rice, kimchi, and a side of pickled vegetables. It’s a delicious and flavourful twist on a classic BBQ dish.
Smoky BBQ Jacob’s Ladder Ribs: Season the Jacob’s Ladder ribs with a dry rub of your choice. You can use a blend of paprika, brown sugar, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, and pepper. Place the ribs on the grill away from direct heat, close the lid, and let them cook for about 2 to 2.5 hours. This slow cooking process will help render the fat and make the meat tender.
After the initial cooking time, brush the ribs with your favourite BBQ sauce and move them directly over medium-high heat on the grill. Continue to cook the ribs for about 5 minutes per side, brushing them with additional sauce and flipping occasionally until the sauce caramelizes and creates a sticky glaze.
For alternatives to the Jacob’s ladder recipe, you could do:
Recipe blogs are just one option, and if you find it hard to write a whole recipe for each product, you can try grouping products and doing serving suggestions instead. This could include drink or wine pairings, or simply which bun to use for different burger flavours. Blogs of this type could include:
In each of these blogs, you should include call-to-action sentences and links to buy the products throughout. These blogs also convert well into social media posts by creating short lists of the key points or posting each serving suggestion on its own.
You could also consider blogs that promote your brand and ethos as a whole, for example:
You will notice many of the blog titles suggested in this blog and many on our website have numbers in them. This is for a good reason. Statistically, people are far more likely to click on a blog that is in a list format or has a number in the title. In fact, depending on your industry, it is up to 7 times more likely that someone will click on the blog if it has a number in the title.
The choice of number is also important. Human psychology means we are more likely to engage/notice some numbers over others. Prime numbers such as 3, 5, and 7 are top of this list, but 10 also ranks well, as do odd multiples of 7, such as 21 and 35. For most blog content, I would try to stick to 3, 5, 7, or 10 as any more than that and it can become too long or the quality of the content will drop which can hurt SEO ranking.
Using numbers can also be helpful if you are not a keen or confident blog writer, as it can help to focus your thoughts and encourage you to complete sections of the blog like a checklist, making the process less painful. For example:
Top 10 tips for cooking the perfect brisket
Or
5 cuts of beef you should try and why!
There are lots of types of steak which not all consumers will be familiar with, for example, onglet steak is rarely heard of or used in the UK. So it can be useful to come up with different steak recipes or serving suggestions to encourage customers to try new things.
You could try some of the following recipes:
Why is blogging so useful for your beef farm diversification?
One of the best things you can do to improve the visibility of your website is to create targeted blog content that is search engine optimisation (SEO) friendly. To make blogs SEO friendly, you need to cover topics that resonate with your ideal client and match how they search for your solution or business online. You can use guesswork to do this, but we would always recommend having keyword analysis completed to have a clearer picture of the topics and phrases you should be focusing on. You can have done through our friends at SEO Angel.
You will also need to make sure you understand how to upload blogs to your website and check the SEO settings while doing this. For WordPress sites, Yoast is a very easy way to make sure you have checked off all the SEO tasks during the upload process.
You might be surprised to learn what words or phrases your customers are searching for online, or more importantly, what words they aren’t using. You might think your customers would be interested in searching for your business via terms like organic beef, but it may turn out high-welfare beef is a more effective term for gaining visibility.
