Blogging Strategies: Becoming a Successful Content Creator
Blogging: not just for the fashionista millennials
A blog is an asset of any strong content marketing tactic. Most established businesses know the importance of blogging. They understand the purpose of incorporating blogging into their content strategy is to educate, engage, and attract more readers and customers. Done right, a blog can help grow both your business and your professional life.
Content Creation Best Practices
CMI and MarketingProfs report that only 37% of B2B companies have a documented content marketing strategy. Which makes no sense – write it down, folks, write it all down!
- Have a content mission statement that says who you are, who you’re trying to reach, how you are going to reach them, and what your goals are.
- Draft a content calendar that maps out your content ideas.
- Focus on mapping content to your personas and where leads are in the buyer’s journey.
- Keep in mind that less is more; make it easy for your personas to consume content.
- Be educational rather than promotional. Concentrate on the informational part of your content first and worry about design second.
- Remarkable, delightful content takes attention; you plan, create, distribute, analyze, and repeat!
Many content creation strategies feed into developing a successful blog. Regularly publishing and promoting new content related to your business and industry helps attract new visitors and convert them into leads. Blogging allows you to stand out as expert in industry and build trust. Read on to discover tactics that will help make your business blog the best it can be.
Fundamentals of Blogging
Do you spend a lot of time writing blog posts, optimizing them for pertinent keywords, promoting the content on social media? Are you still not getting the traffic, comments, likes or shares you’d like to see?I won’t sugar coat it, successful blogging is a lot of work. It can mean involving numerous people from various departments. But it’s your opportunity to showcase the company culture and personality while informing people about the products or services you provide. Here are a few things you might be forgetting to incorporate into your content marketing strategy.
Understand your audience
To fully know your audience, you need to build personas to target people within your audiences. To do so, you ask questions such as what do they want to see? What will help them use your products or services effectively? To answer these questions you can:
- Ask current customers via social polls or surveys what they want to read about
- Analyze your site analytics to identify the type of content people are looking for and the key phrases that people are finding on your website
- Conduct keyword research
- Learn from competitors’ sites
- Engage in social listening
- Review customer service and feedback threads
Be an authority
Use your blog to establish authority through creating content that adds value to your industry. Provide the ‘best answer’ to your audience’s questions. A best answer will continue to be found via search and help your ideal audience. By creating content that ranks well and can be used as a resource you help both your business and the consumer.
On that note, let’s dive deeper into the content piece of blogging…
Content Basics
The key to content creation is staying creative and thinking like your audience. (see above :)) Here are specific blog tactics to keep in mind.
a. Start with a Working Title – Once you’ve picked a topic (after doing keyword research, of course) start with a working title. Include a long-tail keyword in the title and make the value of your post clear. Then shorten the title to less than 60 characters.
b. Less Is More – Companies are publishing so.much.content. Rather than creating a content overload, emphasize quality over quantity. Impactful pieces resonates with people.
c. Timing is Not Everything – Maintain your blog! Visitors to your site don’t want to see that your last post was months ago. Find your blogging rhythm. You don’t need to blog every day or every week but be consistent so your readers know what to expect. Also, experiment with the timing of blog posts. The optimal time will depend on your audience and hinge are when are they willing to read and share your content.
d. Create Evergreen Content – You can modify (or not) certain pieces of content and share with your audience again. Or you can start a series of blogs.
e. Amplify Content with Social Media – Share the articles across all platforms that you are active on (reshare when relevant). Beyond that, make sure to have social sharing buttons and email newsletter sign-up information in your blogs to encourage reader engagement.
f. Promote Offers – To increase lead generation, promote offers on your blog.
g. Analyze Performance – Examine the amount of views, the most popular topics, and the number CTA clicks. This will inform future blogging.
Need help formatting and optimizing your topic? Here are a few blog design specifics:
- use whitespace
- incoproate section headers,
- utilize bullets and/or numbered lists
- bold important text
- use images to break up thetext (and at top of every posts)
- put long-tail keywords in the page title, url, post title, image alt-tags, body, headers (can use synonyms or variations)
- include external and internal links
- feature a call-to-action on your blog sidebar and at end of each post
The key takeaways are: know your audience, concentrate on compelling content that establishes you as an authority (and don’t forget to promote it on social media!), and stay creative. Other things to remember when blogging – blog often, write like you speak, keep it short, there is no perfect, and stay connected with like-minded blogs.
Are you ready now to master the art of blogging? Happy content creating!
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