If you’re adding content marketing to your overall marketing strategy, developing a strong blog is the fuel to reach qualified customers. It can give you credibility, build search authority, and increase social media engagement. But where to begin? These seven best practices for blogging will set you on your way to building a blog strategy with meaning.
Organize Your Content Calendar
Keeping an organized content calendar can help to plan out topics and stick to a cadence that is meaningful for your audience. An organized content calendar also allows room for flexibility when real-time topics or current events occur that are important to weave into your schedule.
Quality Over Quantity
While quantity is important, don’t sacrifice the quality and consistency of your content just to publish more frequently. Test different schedules–maybe that’s once a week instead of every day–and find the rhythm that allows you to produce the best articles for your audience.
Showcase Your Expertise
Your blog is meant to add value to your customers and potential customers, it’s not just a self-promotion tool. Think of your blog as a way to establish your expertise in your industry. Provide insights into industry trends, showcase your clients and customers, and report on the latest happening in your industry. Share updates about your company as well, but balance is essential.
Measure Your Success
How will you measure your blog’s success? Knowing what metrics are important to your organization can help build your content strategy. There are multiple ways to measure your success: social shares, comments, website visits, organic search traffic, new leads, and many more. Once you’ve narrowed in on what you should measure, optimize based on those metrics.
Build Reputable Links
Link building can raise your website’s domain authority and allow you to rank higher with search engines. With strong links coming into your website, it shows search engines that your content is valuable and relevant to the topic they are talking about. If you’re creating great content, other websites will link to it and new audiences will share it. Reach out to a focused group of relevant websites who may be interested in linking to your content. But remember to never spam sites—only suggest content that could add value to the website you are pitching.
Be Hyper-Aware of SEO, But Write Naturally
Understanding your keywords will help guide your blog topics. If you’ve chosen topics that are relevant to your desired audience and fit with your keyword strategy, incorporating those contextual keywords into your content should feel natural, while still strengthening your SEO ranking.
Never Stop Learning
Blog management is a full-time job. Staying on top of the SEO changes and the latest blog research can feel overwhelming but having a few key resources can make all the difference.
