Blogs have rapidly become a critical part of the online marketing world. A well written blog increases the outreach of your brand and directly leads to new customers and sales.
Creating a high quality blog isn’t difficult, but it does require that you obey certain guidelines.
If you are looking to build a better blog for your online property, make sure to always follow these 8 guidelines:
1. Pick Your Topic Carefully
A blog post is only useful if it is about something that interests your target audience. Obviously, this means your blog posts should relate to your product or property, but that isn’t all you should consider when choosing a topic.
You also need to consider the demographic of your target audience and whether your content can add new value to topic.
Useful ways to determine what your interests your audience is to analyze page views from previous blogs and to create digital surveys for your audience using a program like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey.
2. Create an Attention Grabbing Headline
There is a reason that newspapers and magazines have a person on staff whose entire job is literally just to create headlines. A powerful title is critical to getting your audience to read your blog.
A useful tool for building great headlines is the Coschedule Headline Analyzer.
3. Use Strong Formatting
Effectively formatting a blog is a rather in-depth topic. Whole books have been written on the topic. The short version, though, is the internet is a visual medium.
This means you want the formatting of your blog to be visually appealing. Variety in formatting, like bold lettering, italics, and bullet points is one way to create a visually appealing aesthetic.
The other way is to break up the writing into smaller sections, using subheaders and short paragraphs, much like in these guidelines.
4. Include Interesting Images
As just mentioned, the internet is a visual medium. No matter how creatively you format, a plain screen filled with text simply isn’t that appealing.
Add visual appeal to your blog with high quality, interesting images that support your content. Whether you use custom images or stock images, always make sure to follow best practices for image use, including citing your sources.
5. Include Valuable Links
Creating good internal links is both a science and an art. The science has to do with search engines. Your content is more likely to be top rated on a search engine if links are directly relevant to your content.
The art has to do with creating value for you and your audience. Your audience gains value when the links are fresh or interesting.
You gain value when the links support your brand, either by linking to older (but freshly relevant) content you have previously written or when you link to websites that have good authority within your field.
6. Include Strong Metadata
It takes a long time to understand metadata and how it affects the reach of your website, and even longer to master the concept.
Moz has some great resources to help you better understand metadata, or an experienced Crowd Content writer can provide that know-how and create strong metadata for your blog.
7. Include a Call to Action
While it is fine to occasionally write a blog post that exists purely to entertain and engage your audience, the majority of your posts should include a call to action.
That call may be subtle, but it should direct your audience to take action on products or services that you provide.
8. Double Check Your Voice
The voice of your blog is the voice of your entire online presence (and potentially your business). Before you publish anything, confirm that the voice of a blog post is consistent with the overall voice of your business.
If even a single blog post is too light, too firm, too dry, or otherwise doesn’t engage your audience, it can have a negative domino effect on your business.
