With today’s marketing being so crucial to a business, many business owners have turned to blogging for continually fresh content and ongoing customer engagement. For this reason, many popular blogging platforms have expanded their services to make it extremely easy and convenient to start a blog or integrate one into an existing website. If you are a business owner who is considering the startup of blogging, or if you would just like to leverage an existing blog, we have some proven optimization strategies that are sure to gain your blogs more traffic and engagement.
- Expert-generated content. Your content needs to attract both your existing customers and potential customers. Spark some interest amongst your target audience. Take use in your creative and expert writers at your company to turn your blog into a valuable resource for your customers. Make sure you choose experts within your company that can truly provide unique content to your blog, or it can quickly get lost in the mass of company blog posts. The more unique the content, the more attraction it gains. Make your content easy to read by adding bullets, numbering, or italics.
- Schedule regular updates. Every year, many companies make the smart decision of starting a blog; but lose interest and quit altogether. Many business owners realize that coming up with new content each and every day is time-consuming and challenging. For this reason, it is important to make a blogging plan. First, come up with a blog update schedule. Will you update once a day? 3 times a week? And decide who will be doing the updating. When you have decided how often the updates will occur, make a plan for the month so this person knows exactly when and what they will be posting for each update for that month. One the first of every month, make a whole new plan. This will minimize the daily tires of coming up with new content and provide new updates for every post.
- Engage your customers. So you have a significant amount of traffic to your blog post, but is anyone saying anything about it? Not every blog site makes it easy for subscribers to share the content across social networks. Before starting a blog, make sure your provider makes it quick and easy for your users to share your posts. Remove all the obstacles that can prevent social sharing. If a customer has a hard time sharing your post, they simply won’t do it.
- List building. Offer multiple ways of opting in or converting for your customers. Make simple things that are non-committing such as newsletter sign-ups, or free downloads. This is a great way to build list of customers that can be used for marketing, referrals, or research. It doesn’t end there; this list can be used to attempt lead generating efforts. Blog readers tend to be very attentive, and respond when certain offers are thrown their way.
- Monitor your content. Encourage your visitors to engage in different way to test the waters. Monitor what is working and what is not. Encourage your visitors to leave comments on your posts, or suggest that they share your content. By testing all kind of approaches, you can see what is making your customers engage the most.
- Promotional activities. Instead of your typical informative posts, throw in an offer or promotional post every once in a while. This can be effective if the balance between information and promotion is managed properly. However, if you gain a significant number or fans, they can drop like flies if you decide from then on to post only promotional content. This will negatively impact engagement and turn off your audience.
Developing a blog is time consuming and difficult at all times during the process. If planned correctly, properly monitored and created using these optimization tips, a blog can be much easier of a task.
If you can think of other ways to optimize blogs, feel free to share with us! We would love to hear from you at the 1440 Group. To view this full article, click on the link below:
Blogging for Success: Weekend Warrior
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