Your company’s blog is an important component of your content marketing strategy, but simply throwing up blog posts isn’t going to magically make your phone ring and cash register sing.
With so many companies producing and publishing content, you need to make sure that you are providing your readers something useful in order to grab their attention and keep them coming back for more.
A poor strategy for your company blog will make it blend in with the other thousands of blogs out there. Use the following five tips to help improve your blog and grow your readership.
1. Write Blog Posts For Your Readers Not Google
Do not flood your company’s blog with low quality content jam packed with keywords. That worked several years back, but these days that approach will not get you any search engine love. Producing great content that your readers naturally share will give you a search engine optimization benefit, while keyword heavy content will not, as your readers will have zero interest in reading or sharing it.
Create all of your blog posts specifically for your target audience. You should have a very good idea of whom your target customer is, so make sure you write in a tone that they will relate to. Your blog provides you with a way to effectively communicate directly with individuals that are interested in what you are offering.
2. Publish Content Designed to Create Actions
When you create great blog content your readers love to read you can ask them to take action. For example, if you are giving away a free eBook then ask them to download it by submitting their name and email. All you have to do is ask!
Many businesses will create great content and have a great offer on their website but they experience a very low conversion rate. Why? They simply do not ask their readers to take action! Build in an actionable request into your content and watch your conversion rate shoot through the roof!
3. Make Your Blog Easy to Read
When someone land on your blog they immediately decide whether or not they are going to stick around and check out your content or bounce right off the site and look for an alternative. What makes them decide so quickly? The design and layout of your website does! If it looks horrible and cheap or if it is hard to navigate they are going to assume that your content isn’t worth reading.
This doesn’t mean that you need to have a $20,000 website design, but it does mean that you need to make sure that your blog layout is clean, responsive, and easy to navigate. If you are on a budget use a blog template and make sure that it is a responsive design. You want to make sure that every visitor that lands on your blog can easily read it on desktop and laptop screens of all sizes, mobile devices, and tablets.
4. Expand Your Audience Through Syndication & Social Media
In order to expand your readership you need to introduce more people to your blog. You need to figure out how you can get in front of more people that would more than likely be interested in your blog.
The first place you should turn to is social media. Your company should already have an established presence on the popular social media channels. Start to share all of your blog posts on social media, as this is a good way to drive more people to your blog. Since they are already connected to your company’s social profiles there is a good chance they will be interested in reading your blog. Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all good social media outlets to share your content on.
Another way to attract new readers to your blog is by syndicating your content across larger sites that are in the same industry. News sites and general information sites are always looking for content that their readers will enjoy. Make sure that the website receives a lot of traffic before you offer to allow them to syndicate your blog. Check out some posts and see what kind of social sharing they receive. Also, be sure that they provide credit and a link back to the original article source, as this will help you avoid a duplicate content penalty.
5. Make Your Content Simple to Share
Imagine reading a great blog post and then going to click the tweet or share button and not being able to locate one? While it sounds crazy, many blogs simply do not have social sharing options. People love to share information on social media, so make sure that you give them the opportunity to share all of your blog posts.
People like to share content that is useful and makes them look smart. They aren’t doing it just to be nice, as they benefit form your great content as well by looking smart in front of their social following.
Using these tips will help you publish blog content that provides your readers with a good experience and they will come back to read your content on a regular basis. Your company blog isn’t about creating posts with fancy terminology or sales pitches. Publish your blog with your audience in mind and they will continue to come back for more and share your content, exposing more individuals and growing your blog readership.