Your client's blog strategy is one of the most important elements of their inbound marketing campaign. You have undoubtedly heard the phrase “content is king.” A blog provides your clients with the means to index all of their content to improve search engine ranking, show their audience that they are active online, and provide visitors to their websites plenty of useful information.
Whether your clients are just starting out, or their current blog strategy is less effective than they had hoped, these tips will set you both on the right track:
1. Define the Purpose of Your Blog
The purpose of your blog impacts the type and style of your content. For instance, if you are looking to build a community of followers, you need to create informative content that sets you up as an expert. To sell more products, you need to demonstrate why consumers should make a purchase. To improve search engine rankings, you need to build posts around keywords.
2. Learn About Your Audience
Thinking about the goals of your audience can help you determine your objectives. There tend to be three reasons why users are looking for content: to advance their skill sets, to learn something new, or to be entertained by new facts, says HubSpot.
If you are unsure what your audience wants, the best thing to do is ask. This is easy if you are already active on social media. Plus, you can check what other pages your follower like to gain a greater idea of their interests, expectations, and desires. In addition, look through your communications with customers to check if any questions or concerns are frequently cropping up or if clients often request certain information.
3. Develop a Publishing Schedule
An editorial calendar can help you keep track of your blogging goals by enabling you to plan the release of different types of content on different subjects. It is also beneficial for your long-term blog strategy as you can analyze which posts have the highest performance, in terms of criteria such as traffic and conversions, to create similar posts in the future.
At first, it may be difficult to know how many posts you can reasonably expect to publish every week. In content marketing, more is always better, and even small business owners should aim to publish at least two posts per week, says Spokal. Remember, you can reassess your needs and abilities at any time and adapt your editorial calendar accordingly.
4. Create Great Content
Now you have completed all the planning work, it is time to start creating unique, attention-grabbing content. There is a lot that could be said about writing great content, but here are just a few basic tips:
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Be original. Rewriting someone else’s work suggests that you know very little about the subject and only provides readers with information that they could find elsewhere. Worse still, Google penalizes websites for plagiarized and unoriginal content.
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Proofread before publishing. Spelling and grammar mistakes make you appear unprofessional.
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Avoid promotional material. Obviously, you want your content to lead to a conversion; however, no reader is going to enjoy reading a post that is just a disguised sales piece.
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Include images. Diagrams, infographics, and photos split up the page, making it easier to read, and can even enhance a user’s understanding of content.
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Publish guest posts. Pieces from guest bloggers are a great way to increase the amount of content on your blog and to obtain a different point of view on a subject. You can even invite coworkers to be guest bloggers.
5. Promote Your Content
Finally, you need to ensure that your target audience are seeing your content. If you are using relevant keywords, you should be receiving a decent amount of traffic through organic search. However, never underestimate the power of social media. Every time you create a new piece of content, post a link on all your channels. Plus, add social sharing buttons to all your content to encourage others to share.
A blog strategy is never static. Adaptations in your business, updates to search engine algorithms, and changes in the industry as a whole may mean that your past objectives or tactics become irrelevant in the future. However, whatever you do and whatever you want to achieve, regular, quality content is always the pillar of any blog strategy.
