8 Tips For An Effective Blog Strategy
Blogging; it might seem like everyone is doing but does it matter for your business?
From fashion to food, to travel and home, it’s estimated that over 2 million blog posts are published daily and that by the end of 2019, blogging is predicted to be a 300 billion dollar industry. But blogging is no longer just for travel Instagrammers and fashion aficionados these days, blogging can be vital to small and large businesses. Here’s why:
It helps drive traffic to your website.
It can help convert traffic into leads.
It provides value for your audience
It helps establish authority and you as an expert in your industry.
There are so many reasons we love blogs for businesses, but like anything in life, to get the most out of your blog you’ll need to have a solid plan and strategy for it to work effectively!
Below we’ve broken down our top tips for creating an effective blog strategy to help make an impact in your industry:
Make Sure You Are Providing Value.
While you may want to use your blog to showcase your work, driving the hard sell on your blog will only leave your audience disinterested. Posting helpful, quality content to your blog that your audience will actually find valuable will make them feel like you’ve done them a favour. Which in turn allows them to trust you as an expert in your field, and will keep them coming back to your blog and website, ultimately valuing your content and your business.
Whenever we help clients with marketing, we always come back to the question “how is this adding value to the customer”. And it’s the same for blogging. Think about the types of things your audience would find useful and then go from there.
2. Create a long-term blog plan or outline.
When it comes to marketing, we like to have at least the next 3 months mapped out, and blogging is no exception. Sure, plans can change but having a roadmap for your content is so important. Once you have all your blogs mapped out you can connect all your other content to these themes too (for help mapping out photo content, check out this post). This way you can think strategically about campaigns, new products, or new services you have coming up and really bring attention to them.
3. Batch Work
To help us work most effectively, batch-working is a must! By grouping similar blogging tasks together you can save so much time by not moving from one thing to the other. Batch brainstorming, planning and writing your content will not only help you to get it done faster, it will help improve the quality of your work.
“Don’t focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.”
4. Optimise the title of your blogs to make them easily searchable
This tip is probably the most valuable on this list in terms of making sure your blog posts are actually found on the internet. When you think about how to name your blog posts, think about what you would type into a Google search bar to find your specific blog post.
5. Write blog posts in the form of lists
Creating easily digestible content for your audience will keep them coming back. Lists work well because most people skim read blogs and this way readers can easily flick through to the parts that are most relevant to them. It also makes your blog easier to write and plan.
6. Link other parts of your site into your blog
This keeps people on your site for longer, and helps them engage with more of your content, it also boosts your SEO. When you link pages of your website to one another Google sees your site as more credible, helping it to rank higher in search results.
7. Share your blog content across all your platforms
One of the best reasons for having a regular blog, is that you can drip feed your blog content into your various platforms and continually link your audience back to your blog. So the couple hours it might have taken you to write your blog can now be transformed into social media content and copy for a month!
8. Just Start!
There’s no better time than the present. Don’t wait for things to be perfect, to have the perfect topic or write the perfect piece, just make a schedule and stick to it, focus on serving your customers and learning as you go along. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about trying new things and seeing what works best for your business!
“Don’t try to plan everything out to the very last detail. I’m a big believer in just getting it out there: create a minimal viable product or website, launch it, and get feedback.”
From a business standpoint, blogging just makes sense.
To make sure you’re blogging effectively, stick to a solid plan and be open to trying new things. Get feedback from your audience or even ask them what they’d like to hear.
However you go about it, just start, it’s usually the hardest step!
Feel like you’d still need help getting your blog off the ground, or that you might need someone else to manage it entirely? Get in touch.
We’d be more than happy to help with a blog strategy that works for you!