Blogging Is All About Content

Blogging is truly all about the content and it’s not that hard if you get writers to help you or use podcasting and video to make it easier.

As noted above, putting a blog on your business website is a great way to add regular content. And not just the content that you create yourself, either! User-generated content such as blog comments, forum posts, user reviews, and testimonials are all great ways to keep things fresh. Consider how you can relate your expertise and how you can repurpose content from other sources you own with a quick rewrite.

Include Multiple Forms of Media

Make sure when you create content that you include several content styles such as:

Original in-depth content (May take the most effort to write.)
Curated or aggregated content (Reviewing content someone else made) This is fairly easy to write and/or outsource.)
User-generated content (UGC) (Easiest since others create it for you, but you must monitor it for spam or inappropriateness.)

It is ideal to have a balance of these three types of content, as it makes your job easier. Some bloggers aim to have twice as much curated/aggregated content as original content, and twice as much UGC as curated content.

The easiest way to get your blog going and develop your own posting momentum is to create an editorial calendar.

First, decide how often you want to post. Weekly? Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays? Your schedule doesn’t matter as much as your sticking to it, since readers like to know that there will be new content fairly regularly. If it’s not there, they will stop checking in. One post a week is a good place to start if you’ve never maintained a blog before, but plan to upgrade to twice a week or even daily once you get more comfortable with the blogging process. When you get to the point of making a post a day, that’s when the truly amazing results start to happen. When you share and properly promote that much good content, you are guaranteed results.

Example

Here’s an example. At McDougall Interactive, we had a golf equipment client who we convinced to do their own video camera blog posts and text reviews of golf clubs. They had a warehouse stocking employee who bought into this idea and at times did a couple posts a day. In his first six months of blogging hard, they got 10,000 visits to the blog, whereas before the blog did almost nothing. Another client had one very niche-oriented blog post he wrote on a Saturday that generated dozens of orders in the following week.

Important: Many blogging experts believe that you will need to post at least twice a week to keep the attention of the search engines.

If you’re assigning your blog maintenance to someone on your team, don’t just hope that someone gets around to making posts. Treat your blog like any other part of your marketing strategy and approach it tactically. Brainstorm content, categories, and topics for a minimum of three to six months ahead. This is your editorial calendar, and it will keep you on track. Plus, you’ll never be stuck on a Monday morning, racking your brain for something to blog about.

Photo credit: greg.turner / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA