How to Blog Effectively for Better Results

If you are evaluating your marketing strategy and find yourself wondering how much your company blog matters and whether you should continue to put effort into it, the answer is yes!

According to our partner Hubspot, 85 percent of marketers report, blogging still delivers results.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take your blog to the next level. Below are two lists – one of best practices and another of “next level” tactics. Both will show you how to blog more effectively and get results.

Ten timeless blogging best practices:

Most of the blogging best practices still apply. Here’s a list of ten you should already be implementing.

• Write for your customer – Only write content that matters to prospective clients and existing customers. Skip everything else.

• Search engine optimization – SEO makes your blog posts search engine-friendly. It also often helps with readability.

• Update old posts – More than 70 percent of bloggers report this receives good results! Update how-to’s and best practices articles regularly. 

• Link to old posts – This tactic keeps older blog posts relevant and circulating. Wisdom doesn’t go bad!

• Use a Call to Action – Ask your readers to take an action with each article – subscribe, download an ebook, visit your services page.

• Track your work – Know what works and what doesn’t. Track traffic, subscribers, shares, and more, and use that information to improve.

• Use media – Word count is important but so are images, infographics, videos, and podcasts.

• Make sharing easy – Social media sharing icons are important. Without them, content dies on your website.

• Share, share, share – Push content to your social media sites and make sure email subscribers are receiving content to their inboxes.
• Consider the skimmer – Not all of your blog visitors will read your every word. Many readers skim for important information. Make paragraphs small and use headers, bullets, and images to break up content.

Ten blogging tactics for more results:

After you implement the blogging best practices, consider this list for ideas about how to blog to get results going forward.

• Be different – You can be professional and still have a personality. There are enough businesses and individuals blogging these days. Stand out. Even if you are writing your blogs as your business, not as an individual, let a little bit of your business culture peep through.

• Use an editor – The use of an editor has doubled in recent years. Have someone read over your work for clarity and consistency as well as grammatical errors.

• Link to others – In the past, this was a no-no. But if you are being strategic, linking to relevant content off your site isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If you’ve written a good blog, they’ll be back.

• Give it away – Consider giving away some of your previously valuable, “gated” content, that is the content that requires readers to fill out a form. Again, if you’ve done a good job, they’ll convert.

• Write more and for longer – The average blog post is now 1100+ worlds long. Many bloggers are posting twice a day and seeing results. Learn more about content creation (or some relevant blog post here). 

• Use MORE media – Studies indicate using as many as 11 images can benefit your blog article. Video continues to be popular but be sure to utilize subtitles. Often times on social channels, video is watched on mute.

• Reshare older content  – Leverage older articles on social media by posting them to your pages again, maybe with those updates we mentioned, or on new platforms they weren’t shared on before.

• Boost content – Only four to six percent of your followers are seeing your socially published content. Pay to increase the visibility of your more important articles. If they’re share-worthy, a little boost will help them gain traction.

• Acknowledge influencers – In addition to social media, influencers in your industry can be just as important as customers. Sharing your content in social media groups is a powerful way to promote your blog content.

• Blog for someone else – Guest blogging is one of the best ways to gain traffic to your own blog, and not enough people are doing it.

Need help creating content for your blog? Above the Fold Media is an expert digital marketing agency that offers content creation services and more. Learn more about our content services or request a consultation with one of our specialists today.