We get a lot of questions at Hughes & Co. from clients and business owners alike about what our secret recipe is for successful blog writing. Blogs aren't the only piece of the puzzle that makes for amazing results for our clients, but its an important one. To have an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to be creating quality blog content regularly.
If you're looking to write blogs for your business then you're already taking steps in the right direction. Here are some of our best practices for constructing a blog post and making sure that the content you are producing is the right content.
In order to have a digital presence you should be consistent about the frequency with which you post. Whether you're blogging one day per week or five, pick a number and a day and stick with it. You want your blogging to show your business in its best light, not a business with large gaps between content updates.
Decide how many times per week you can commit the time to creating high quality content. Then, follow through. If you've committed to posting every Wednesday, make sure you've got something to post every week on that day.
Coming up with inspiration every week can be difficult. You may work in an industry where there isn't a lot of new information to share even once a week, let alone more than that. If you struggle to choose a blog post topic, set aside time at the beginning of every month and plan out a list of topics that you can blog about.
At minimum your post should be 300 words long for Google to recognize your business blog and for it to rank. At maximum, the word count of your blog should be about 500 words, your audience won't care to read much longer than that.
Remember that your website traffic likely isn't coming to your blog looking for a collection of essays to read. Long posts risk losing your reader's interest, and large blocks of text may scare people off all together.
Break up your content into smaller chunks using content sections and subtitles. Once you have your text broken up, use visuals in the blog. Adding in photos is great, and adding in videos is even better. Your goal is to keep your readers engaged so they reach the end of your post, where a call-to-action is waiting for them.
Have you followed those steps and created some great content? Amazing! This is your first step to improve your marketing in 2017. Now it's time to learn more about optimizing your blogs further and increasing your SEO score so that your blogs work to drive up your website traffic.