Your blog is pretty valuable real estate online. It is a place where you can connect and engage with your clients and customers along with those that are looking to potentially use your service. The problem is that the Internet is chock full of lots of other blogs and content sources that are vying for the attention of your readers thanks to free blogging opportunities offered online. This means that your audience might be taken away from you if you don’t add some value to your blog that keeps your audience coming back to see what you have to say. Time is money, and you want people to spend time reading your content otherwise you’ve wasted everyone’s time!
Personality
Unless your product is something for the bland, you’re going to want to inject some of your personality into your blog posts. Sounding like a robot isn’t going to engender people to love your blog. Adding personality that makes your blog sound like it has been written by another human will help to give it that personality that assists you to connect with your reader. It’s harder to ignore something written with personality that resonates with a reader than reading something without personality. This is a great way to make your readers see the people behind the brand rather than keeping this nameless, faceless persona of a company. That being said, you should keep in mind your tone for your particular audience.
Tone
You may remember tone of voice from any of your classes that required you to write. The tone that you use is going to usually be based on the audience that you are writing towards in any particular piece. A DIY article on how to optimize a blog for beginners should be written with that beginner audience in mind. This is going to go into more depth explaining technical terms and using laymen’s terms to help get the idea across on how to tackle the subject. The audience demands that the tone fit beginners, and would probably be different if that same blog post was geared towards more experienced bloggers. The same is true if you are writing more for business to business blogs in comparison to business to consumer blogs. This may require more formal writing to be used. The key is to focus on your particular target audience.
Relevant
You also want your blog posts to be relevant. You may notice that people are quick to jump to saying something in the comments when people post things to social media that are not current or relevant. If you do want to bring up a topic that has been discussed ad nauseum, try to find a way to make your post unique. Take a unique stand or focus on something that hasn’t been expressed before.
To stay relevant, you need excellent headlines to draw readers in. Use the free Copywriter Today headline tool to get started!
Post Frequently
There is no rule that says that you need to post things several times a day to your blog, but if you want to keep your readers coming back for more, you should think about posting frequently. It can be optimal to have a new post every day for your blog, but that isn’t possible for everyone to do. You should aim to get a new post up about two to three times a week as a rule of thumb.
Weekdays
You should focus more of your attention to post your blogs during the weekdays as many people are not online on the weekends. Any posts that you create on the weekends can always be scheduled during the week where you should be able to garner more attention to them. Of course, there are always some topics that do great over the weekend that may still get the attention you want, so don’t think of this as a hard and fast rule.
Change It Up
No, changing it up doesn’t mean that you should be changing your topic that you blog about, but you shouldn’t fall into this same pattern of always posting the same routine things. This can get boring for your company and your readers. Keep it interesting. Change up the type of blog posts that you do from time to time. Have someone new write a blog post to bring a new voice to your blog. This can be a different employee that can bring a new perspective to your blog or even bring in guest bloggers that can work to improve the network that you have with your business.
Make Posts Just Right
You shouldn’t have hard and fast rules for how long or short your blog posts are going to be every day. Sometimes short and sweet will work and other times you may have to get a little more in-depth on a topic. You should focus on what that particular topic needs to accomplish. You may have a blog post one day that works well at just 400 words that fully goes over the topic and gets the message across to the reader. Trying to expand that 400 words into 800 words might not be necessary, and may cause there to be fluff that doesn’t keep the reader engaged. Other times, you may find that your post needs to be over 1,000 words to do it justice or has to be a series to make sure that all points are covered. You don’t want your posts to be too short or too long, but just right.
Create Engagement
Creating engagement is one of the best reasons to have a blog. It gives you a chance to build a rapport with your target audience and garner more attention. Social media, comment sections, and more allow for you to engage with your readers, so make sure that you are using them to the best of your ability. Allow for your readers to share your blog posts with their friends and family on their social networks. Share your posts with any of the social media platforms that you use to bring your followers and friends new content. You should also allow for your readers to follow you using RSS to keep up to date with your posts.
Allow comments on your blog pages. Not only should you allow these comments, but you should encourage your readers to post to them. After you get comments, you should also continue engagement by responding to what people have said about your post to keep the conversation going strong. It shows your readers that you care what you’ve written, and you care about their comments. This goes back into personalizing your posts.
Don’t Lose SEO Basics
Content is king, and having quality content is always a must-have when posting to your blog, but it can sometimes be forgotten that SEO works. You should try to incorporate SEO basics into each of your blog posts. That means to have some keywords entered into your content naturally that help your blog posts get found by search engines and new people. For instance, it can be helpful to have keywords in your title, tags, first paragraph and so on without going overboard and stuffing keywords into your content.
Keep Track
You should be keeping track of your blog and each blog post. It can be helpful to see how many views your posts get and other analytical information that can be used for the future. This information can help you in your plans for furthering your blog. You may find that some posts are not garnering the attention that you want your posts to be, and you can either find ways to get those posts more attention in the future by tweaking the way that you handle them to make them more like your popular posts, or you can focus more on what is working for you already. Either way, this information will help guide you into putting your time and attention into blog posts that are going to pay off with interested readers that are ready to engage with your company.
Visual Gold
Blogs that are well-written are vital to your blog doing well, but you shouldn’t ignore making your blog more visually interesting. You can make your own charts or infographics or take pictures to use for your blog. If taking your own pictures is not for you, there are plenty of companies out there that offer reasonable prices on their images or images that can be used under creative commons. Don’t forget the impact that a well-placed picture, infographic, or other types of image can add to your blog. Pictures draw the eye, and will help to win you readers that want more than just a glob of text on the page.
You should also keep in mind that you can and should format your text to look great on the page. Use a font that is readable. Use headers that help to break apart your text. Make your content pop on the page and keep readers interested. You know what you enjoy seeing in a blog, so apply that towards your own blog.
Your blog should not only entice a reader to click on your blog post because they are intrigued by the headline, but should make them want to stick around to read what is said in the post. Keep your blog readers coming back for more with these value adding tips.
No time to create content that will keep bringing your readers back for more? Contact us today to see how we can help keep your blog posts flowing fresh and regularly.