You know you’re supposed to blog to help bring traffic to your website. However, it’s important to have a plan about what you’re going to blog about, what format everything will be in, and to understand what your goals are. Without knowing the point of your blogging you won’t be successful.
1. Your Blog Should Be on Your Website
Don’t create a blog separate from your website. Your blog should be on the website you’re trying to promote. You want to bring traffic to your most important asset, so most of the content that you create should be right on your own website. That includes blog posts, articles, videos, graphics, and more.
2. Insert Relevant Graphics and Images
To make your blog posts more interesting it’s important to insert relevant graphics and images into your blog posts. You want to make use of white space and graphics to make your content more interesting and readable to your audience. Images can help people understand text better by giving them a visual representation of your message.
3. Mix Up Types of Content with Images, Podcasts, Video, and Text
Your blog doesn’t have to be all text. In fact, it shouldn’t be all text. It’s best to mix up the forms of content. Try using infographics, podcasts, video and text for your blog posts. This will give your audience an interesting variety of content to read and view that will keep them coming back. Plus, not everyone likes the same type of content, so repurposing content into different forms is also helpful.
4. Understand Who Your Audience Is
If you don’t know who your audience is, it will be difficult to create content that is useful for them. You need to do research about your audience so that you can create audience personas. By being able to create an actual persona that you will create content for, you’ll be able to create more interesting content that truly works to attract your target audience. In addition, you’ll be able to create products and/or services that they need more easily because you understand them.
5. Create Relevant Content on a Regular Basis
Studies show that creating at least 20 blog posts a month will bring in 97 percent more inbound links than if you don’t blog. In fact, according to HubSpot, 92 percent of companies that blog more than once a day get more customers from their blogs. As you can see, you need a lot of relevant content to be successful. But, it’s easy to produce content when you see the results.
6. Understand What the Point of the Content Is
Each blog post that you create needs a reason for being. Don’t just create content willy-nilly with no idea why. You may be promoting your products or services, or educating your audience on a subject important to them, or sharing someone else’s work regarding your topic. Whatever the reason is, it’s important to understand the point. Do you want more newsletter sign-ups? Do you want to sell something? What is your point?
7. Promote Your Blog Posts with Social Media
Finally, it’s important to promote each blog post that you create. Promote it via your own social networks, and ask your followers to do the same. Make it easy for people to share, no matter how they found out about your blog. Put share buttons for a variety of social media networks on your blog. Put share buttons on your email newsletter too. The easier you make it for people to share, the better.