Blogging is one of those things that you either love or absolutely loathe. What do you talk about? How often do you talk about it? What if your business or product is er… boring? Here’s our tips on how to engage your audience and make your blog a successful aspect of your online marketing efforts.
- Proof read, proof read, proof read!! Nothing will make readers bail quicker than a blog post that is littered with spelling and grammatical errors. Ensure your blog post is well written and easy for the reader to digest. Unless it is a specifically technical article, keep it simple.
- Your blog should be a resource of information not just a PR machine for your business. If every post you write is all about your product/service, readers will get bored fairly quickly. Research what is popular in your industry and write about that along with the occasional product news post. Also make your content shareable. Write about a topic that readers will want to share with colleagues, family and friends on social media. Perhaps you have the solution to a problem or have a humorous view on an issue?
- Build relationships with your readers by always be professional, authoritative and conversational. Build trust and work towards being considered an expert by sharing your expertise and experiences. Encourage readers to add their thoughts and views in the comments.
- Find a user-friendly, well-known and well supported software package for blogging. We highly recommend WordPress. Incorporate content sharing apps /plugins so your posts can be easily shared by anyone on social media. Which social media platforms you use will determine which apps will best suit your needs. Overall, we think Add to Any Social Media Share Buttons is a great place to start.
- Make your posts visually pleasing. No-one likes to be faced with long blocks of text they have to plough through. Be sure to add images, graphics and white space. The use of lists and headings can help break things up too.
- Mix it up! Use a combination of text posts, videos, podcasts and audio files to keep your audience interested and returning.
- What are your favourite blogs? What do they do well that keeps you coming back? Emulate that.
- What is the reader supposed to do once they have finished reading? Is it signing up for your digital newsletter, commenting, purchasing a product, contacting you? Have a clear call to action to keep readers engaged.
- The final and probably most difficult thing you need to do to ensure your blogging is successful is to commit to it and post regularly. A post every month is not going to cut it. The more you post and the more quality content you have out there, the more successful your blog will be.
