Even More Tips for Great Blog Posts
Blogs continue to be one of the best ways for brands to connect with their target audiences. We previously wrote a piece called tips for an effective blog post, but given that they continue to be such a powerful marketing tool, we wanted to expand on our advice with a follow-up article.
Are blogs really that useful?
In short, yes! Blogs can support many marketing goals, including sharing education and thought leadership insights, improving SEO to bring traffic to your website, supporting social media and email campaigns and more. Here are some telling statistics to get your brand on board:
- Websites that have a blog are shown to have 434% more indexed pages
- Seventy-seven percent of internet users read blogs
- Businesses that blog experience twice as much email traffic as businesses who don’t
- Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to have a positive ROI on their efforts
- Companies who blog get 97% more links to their websites
Tips to make the most of blogs
Beyond the standard advice of maximizing keywords and SEO efforts, in this piece we want to dive deeper into the importance of backlinking, developing strong meta descriptions and more.
Backlinking – This strategy involves adding links within your text to other reputable, high-quality websites. As Google crawls the website, these connections increase your sites trustworthiness.
Internal linking – Creating opportunities for readers to move farther into your website is a great way to increase visitor time-on-site, provide valuable content and ultimately move an individual closer to a sale. These should be natural throughout the blog and link back to relevant content.
Meta descriptions – The text that shows up under a site’s title in Google’s organic search results is a meta description. Typically 100-160 characters, this copy should be optimized to include primary and secondary keywords in a conversational tone focused on answering what your blog will provide readers.
To further improve your blog strategy, here are some additional tips:
Provide value – The most important thing when creating a blog is to provide value to your readers. Think about your audience and what type of content is important to them. Then, produce high-quality blogs that will help your brand connect with its audience. Leveraging tools like Answerthepublic.com can help you identify what questions are important.
Write different types of blogs – Mix things up and write different types of blogs to keep the interest of your readers. There are so many types to choose from including listicles, how-to’s, FAQs, case studies or white paper summaries, news reviews or insights and more.
Post consistently – Your brand doesn’t have to post a lot, but it does need to post consistently so that your readers know when to expect your content. Once a week or even once every couple weeks could be enough to hold your audience.
Promote your blog – Make sure to use owned media channels like your social media and email blasts to promote your blog. If you don’t let your audience know you’ve published a new blog, it won’t get as many views.
Include images – A huge block of text can be a turn off. Break up your text with images, infographics and video. Optinmonster notes that blogs that include images had 94% more views than those without any visuals.
Think of the user experience – Ensure that your blog is easy to use and search, your readers will appreciate a good experience.
Develop an editorial calendar – Plan out your blogs in advance so that you aren’t rushing to get something out. Do research to develop topics that will interest your audience. Consider timely events, the news and sales cycles to ensure you are delivering the right content at the right time.
Blogs are a valuable marketing tool! By taking your blog beyond the basics and focusing on other elements such as backlinking and meta descriptions, you can improve your website’s overall performance via better blogging.
Learn more about the content marketing services (like customized blogs) offered at Beyond Fifteen. You can also give us a call to connect with one of our marketing strategists!