We’ve talked before about the importance of content marketing (and how we can do it for you). Showing your industry knowledge and thought leadership can be key for establishing your brand in the marketplace and can be a vital asset in search engine optimisation, as well as providing some key source material for your social media accounts and any newsletters you send out.
One of the simpler ways of upping your output of content, without re-writing the architecture of your site, is a blog attached to your corporate website. They’re technically easy to set up and editorially they give you pretty much free reign to write about what you like.
Many take that liberty and abuse it, by writing about whatever they can pad out to 600 or so words, in the hope that it will ‘generate some interest’. And people who write vague and untargeted posts almost always say ‘this may generate some interest’.
On the other hand, an editorial calendar which is thoroughly thought through and which illuminates the organisation’s core skill sets and products and uses the content to shed new light and angles on that can drive awareness of the organisation, while humanising the expertise within it. Having named authors on your blog shows the extent of the skillset of the team in your company, giving potential clients or customers confidence in the organisation.
As with all content plans, they should reflect the needs of the audience, not the organisation and drive the users to an awareness of what you do, an understanding of the standards to which you do it and the skill level of the team who will deliver it.
If that sounds complicated or you can’t envision how that plays out in your organisation, we can help you plan your editorial through a process of content design. Feel free to get in touch.
But if you have a blog, or something similar, on your website, or if you post epistles on LinkedIn, then make sure you consider these basics:
Post with purpose
Don’t start writing a word soup and then stop when you’ve hit word count. When working out what to write, consider the key points:
- What is the topic of your blog post?
- What is the point of your blog post? You may already have a topic, but the point will drive your blog post. What conclusion do you want people to reach?
- Are you going to include a Call to Action? (Do you want people to respond to your post with comments or suggestions?
What are you going to call it?
You will want a catchy title. Something that intrigues the reader to click on the link to your blog and/or to start reading it but is also not too long. You may want to use bold (but not fruity) language, alliteration, or another literary tactic to grab your audience. More importantly, perhaps, you should also want to consider how that title will resonate in search - does it use the words that people normally use to talk about that subject?
Get the style and tone right
You’ll need an editorial style guide of some kind, but, in general, the tone and style of a blog post needs to be informal, and more so than the ‘corporate’ communications that come from elsewhere in your organisation. This is not a research paper and definitely not a time for technical or pedagogical ruminations. You should write this as if you are writing to a friend; it should feel personal and be in plain language.
This is a time when using personal pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘you’ and ‘we’ will benefit your blog post. They help make the post more feel more personal, like you are having a one-on-one conversation with the reader.
Images & Links
Include images - they will help make your text more engaging. Include links to create more depth to your blog. If there are supplementary materials you can link to, or video you can embed, it will make the whole thing tell the story much more fully. And it will be more useful to your readers.
Length
The general recommendation is that a blog should be between 400-600 words. Beyond that, people tend to stop reading. This study showed that people read an average of 593 words on a web page. Longer word counts tended not to encourage a longer linger from readers.
However, the average word count of top ranking articles on Google according to SEO circles tends to be closer to 2000, so there's a clear conflict of interest. The solution is to segment your content. Save the snappy blog articles for proper engagement and to connect with your tribe. Create more encyclopedic pieces as white papers when you want to impart more knowledge and appear in the top spots. But be sure that you when you get there, you still retain your readers' interest. Section up longer content pieces, use text anchors to speed people onto what they want the most, and give people bale options via helpful calls to action.
Spread the word
Writing a blog without trying to ‘market’ it is like writing a letter without bothering to post it. Email, tweet, post, link - just make sure that you connect this with your networks, both professional and personal.
And watch the reactions
Once you’ve posted, see what the reaction is - what topics get people re-tweeting, commenting, liking and so on. Not that you should just keep on on those topics (there’s a law of dwindling returns), but see what sort of tone, topic and approach seems to hit people’s buttons.
And keep doing it. Anyone can start an editorial process, keeping it going is the difficult thing, and that takes planning. We’d explain how, but we’re way over the usual word count, so get in touch instead.
