Does Your Awesome Blog Suck?

Does Your Awesome Blog Suck?

10 Content Strategy Tips For Bloggers

Your small business understands the value in content marketing and business blogging. You've been at it for a few months, gotten some good results, but not the awesome numbers you've been hoping for. So, what's the problem? It could be your content strategy; how you plan, develop and manage your content. Creating the content is one thing, but if that content isn't created correctly, or is created without any focus, or isn't created with any consistency, then you actually don't have as awesome as a blog as you think. In this whitepaper I will outline 10 content strategy tips for business bloggers that will take your business blog to the next level.

#1  -­‐  Define  Your  Blogging  Objectives  

Why are you blogging? What do you hope to accomplish with your business blog? Doing it because your competition is doing it, or because it's the latest marketing trend, isn't good enough. If you don’t know what you are trying to achieve with your blog, then it’ll be hard to determine if your blog is successful as well as what you need to do to accomplish those goals. Here are six questions from Quicksprout that can help you determine your blogging objectives:

• Do you want to drive foot traffic to your shop or office?

• Do you want to increase sales or generate leads?

• Do you want to attract prospects in an area outside of your local area? Do you want to attract clients from overseas?

• Do you want to educate prospects and customers on what you do? • Do you want to update your customers about what’s going on with your

business? • Do you want to build a brand?

Tip: Keep your list of goals to two or three, as any more than that will be just as bad as having no goals at all. The point here is focus, knowing what you want your business blog to do, how to get there, and what metrics you need to know to measure progress.

#2  -­‐  Offer  a  Variety  of  Content    

You might have been told how including photos, video, infographics, and slideshows into your blog posts can boost traffic and engagement. Although that’s great, it’s not what we mean here by “variety of content”. What we mean is switching up the types of blog posts that you do, not always doing how-to posts or meaty, research-based content. Switching up the type of content you post can engage different parts of your audience in different ways. Write something fun, tying pop-culture into your industry, or maybe make a bold, controversial statement. Think of your blog as a diet of information for your audience. In order for a diet to be a good diet, it needs to have a variety of content and not just the same thing all the time. Tip: As a guideline, blog posts should be between 600 and 800 words. This doesn't mean 400-word posts are bad, but 400 words isn't a lot or room to go into detail about a specific topic, or to make that bold, controversial statement. Great content offers new, compelling information, and that's much easier to do in 800 words instead of 300 or 400.

#3  -­‐  Stick  to  a  Consistent  Publishing  Schedule    

Not many people will read a newspaper or magazine that publishes once a month, and then once a week, and then three times per week, and then never again for four months. Think of your blog in the same way, where it’ll be difficult to attract and to keep readers if you don’t have a consistent publishing schedule. Although twice a week is optimum, keep to a schedule that doesn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Do what’s best for readers as well as your business. A good way to ensure your company sticks to a consistent publishing schedule is to have more than one person (the more, the merrier) involved in writing content for the blog. This makes it so much easier to produce two or three posts per week, especially if your primary blogger gets sick or gets swamped with other work. It also ensures that your blog will be more awesome and more successful, since more people within your company will have a vested interest in maintaining and promoting the blog. Tip: At a minimum, publish at least once a week. It takes about 50 blog posts before the return on investment for your blogging efforts is noticed. Blogging less than once a week means that it will take you over a year turn receive a significant ROI.

#4  -­‐  Formatting  

This is something that a lot of business bloggers forget, but is so crucial to creating content that will interest your audience. Formatting your blog posts makes the content easier for the reader to digest, which is great for user experience, while adding opportunities for search engine optimization. Good formatting techniques include bullet points, numbering, subheadings, and pictures (perfect for how-to posts), so include at least one technique in every post. White space is your friend because it adds a cleaner,

more organized appearance, and formatting is the easiest way to add white space to your blog. You can have the most thoughtful, well-written content in the world, but if it’s just lines and lines of text with no breaks, the initial impression of the post can be very daunting to a reader who doesn’t have much time in the first place.

#5  -­‐  Amplify  Your  Content  

The line, "if you build it, they will come," doesn't quite work in content marketing. You do need to spend some time getting the word out there about the great stuff you published. Two good ways to amplify your content are to share your posts on social media and to make the content easy to find on search engines with search engine optimization. If you don't take the time to make your stuff easy to find, and to market your marketing, hardly anyone will find it or will know that it's there. Tip: Make sure to add social sharing buttons to your blog as well as each of your blog

posts. This is something that many business bloggers fail to do, but adding these buttons takes some of the onus of amplification off of you. And why not? If you write a great blog post that ends up being wildly popular, you want your readers to be able to share it on Facebook and to email it to colleagues. Besides, the social proof is also powerful in attracting and keeping readers.

#6  -­‐  Avoid  the  Self-­‐Promotion  

Yes, one of the possible goals mentioned in the first tip was "update your customers about what’s going on with your business." That's a fine goal, and if that's your goal, then your business blog should be all about you. However, if that's not your goal, then avoid the self-promotion. Don't talk about your products, your services, and how great you are all the time, especially since that information is also known as "the rest of your website." Your audience doesn't care. The blog is one place on your website that's for the potential customer, even about them, and they want to know if you understand their

problem and how to solve it. That's what your audience cares about, so address those topics, instead of trying to make the sale on that particular post. Tip: A good way to keep self-promotion down is to follow the 50/50 rule on social media. Fifty percent of the time, share your own content. The other 50%, share someone else's. After all, social media is about socializing, and talking about something other than yourself once in a while.

#7  -­‐  Create  a  Content  Inventory    

Every quarter or so, take the time to do an inventory of the content you have on your blog. This content inventory should include the types of content as well as the topics covered, and will help in determining what you can publish next by finding the gaps in the information that you’re communicating. For example, if you have a home repair blog, a content inventory can tell you that you have a lot of content about windows and floors, but not so much on plumbing or about choosing a home repair company. Think of the inventory as an audit, where you can evaluate your business blogging process and find where you can do better. Tip: A content inventory isn’t the same as an editorial calendar, although the two can work together. With a content inventory, you can find the gaps in your blog and plan to fill in those gaps by scheduling the appropriate content ahead of time.

#8  -­‐  Reuse  Your  Blog  Posts  

A great way to get more traction out of some of your blog posts is to reuse them. We don’t necessarily mean publishing them again on your blog, but by repackaging these posts in other ways. For example, if you have 25 posts about a certain topic, then you can turn those 25 posts into a guide, whitepaper, or a short eBook on that topic that you can use as an offer to generate leads. You could also take your 10 or 15 most popular blog posts and publish a roundup, or do a roundup of blog posts on a certain topic if you don’t quite have enough to create a guide. Reusing your blog posts means that these posts aren’t just published once and forgotten about, but instead are given more opportunities to engage your audience. Tip: Don't be afraid to share your content more than once! Your readers and followers are online at different times of the day, and most of them, most of the time, won't see your blog post when you shared it the first time. Of course, don't re-amplify a blog post the very next day. You want some space in between so it's not obvious you're sharing something for a second or third time.

#9  -­‐  Think  about  the  Headline  

Great content can mean the difference between someone sticking around to read several posts versus clicking away without reading one. However, people won't read other posts if the headlines aren't very good. In fact, most of your readers will probably only read the headline, and won't bother to click on the actual article to learn more. To get them to click, your headline needs to explain to the reader what the article is about. A good headline needs to be clear, specific, and concise. Below are two examples, one of a good headline and one of a bad headline: Bad Headline: Keeping a Business Calendar Good Headline: How to Keep a Weekly Calendar in 5 Simple Steps With the good headline, the reader can immediately tell what the blog post is about and whether or not it's worthwhile for them to read. If the reader needs help keeping a weekly business calendar, then that's the article for to read! Otherwise, they will skip over it, like they probably will with the bad headline.

One other important thing to consider when creating headlines is the impact in search and social. With search, stick with headlines that are under 65 characters long. This will avoid any truncated headlines on SERPs (search engine result pages), giving the reader the full title – increasing the likelihood of a click-through. In the social world, content moves at a lightning quick pace. You have seconds to grab somebody’s attention as they scroll through their Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. feed. Make your headlines pop with creative, attention-grabbing copy that both explains and intrigues the reader. Tip: If your blog post includes a video or an infographic, include that in the title by adding [with video] or [infographic] at the end. People like that stuff, so let them know when you include it in your content.

#10  -­‐  Is  This  of  Value  to  the  Potential  Customer?  

This is the question you need to ask before you write every single blog post, web page, white paper, or any other piece of marketing content. If you are not writing things that are of value to potential customers, even if this content aligns with your blogging

objectives and offers variety, then that content is not worth writing. Period. Don’t write content for the search engines, or content for the purpose of getting found online or ranking for a particular keyword. If you can answer, “Yes”, with every single blog post and web page you publish, then the keyword, SEO stuff will fall into place and work itself out. Search engines don’t buy from you. People buy from you, so write for people, and write things that people will find valuable. Take these content strategy tips and infuse them into your content marketing and business blogging efforts from here on out. They are guaranteed to take your blog to the next level. Like all facets of content and social media marketing, the changes won't take place overnight. However, over time, through consistency and persistence, you'll come to find your blog becoming the awesome marketing tool that you set out for it to be in the first place.

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