Blogging is a great way to keep your website regularly updated with new content, help your viewer ranking on Google as well as driving people to your site. Now, more than ever before, content can really help engage a target audience and give them a reason to trust and believe in your organisation.
Here are our tips for blogging in a time-efficient and engaging manner.
Content
Finding a niche or angle that is different or unexplored that will give your audience a reason to read. Blogs can be incredibly effective to engage on a more human level, communicating purpose and sharing information that is not always directly linked to selling your product and services. One of the world’s most successful bloggers, Malala Yousufzai, began her blog to campaign for girls’ education and initially wrote in Urdu in 2009. Diaryofthedad.co.uk started as a hobby for Tom Briggs taking on childcare and household tasks, it led to award wins and securing Tom a full-time job as a writer and blogger.
Communication style
It’s all about the content and how you deliver it. Did you react to the split infinitive in the title? Blogging is about communicating to the readers you are targeting in a way that they will engage with, and if the language is too formal it may distance the reader which is the opposite of what you want to achieve. Your writing style and organising your content coherently will be important. Think of your objectives in writing a blog. Are you seeking to inform, persuade or entertain?
Planning
Think about how regularly you want your blog to appear and how much time you can commit to writing it, include in your plan:
- A schedule of blog topics and identify any research you need to do
- A calendar of which topics will appear when
- Ideas on how to promote your blog content on other platforms, see here for tips
Take account of relevant seasonal events, new product launches and any offers or company news.
Success criteria
With clear objectives and a plan, you can look at how to track engagement and the most important statistics for your blog. Part of this might be linked to increasing traffic to your site, growing your social media following and driving sales enquiries. Once published, you can use your website and social media analytics to assess the type of content that engages your audience most and build from there.
Consistency
Regularly delivering content helps to increase traffic over time. It means that followers know when to expect content and are more likely to become a regular reader. Writing blogs in advance will help you to maintain your blog, even in busy periods, inviting content from guest bloggers can also keep content fresh and give a new perspective.
Whatever you have to say, if you do it with enthusiasm and it is expressive and well-written it will have an impact. You may be selling brown paper packaging but find a way to write about it that compels your target audience; Julie Andrews immortalised it briefly in song!
For advice about creating content that encourages action, please contact Caroline Walker.