You’ve got a blog? Great! You have great content? Even better! Do you know why you’re writing and sharing all of that great content? Do you know what you need to be doing with it?
Almost everyone these days knows they need to be blogging if they want to keep up with the competition and grow their business, but a lot of people don’t know the specifics as to exactly how to use that great blog.
If you’re simply writing and sharing great content just to have it, in the hopes of potential clients actually reading it, you need to change your blogging strategy. Here are a few of the most important questions to ask when determining what your new blogging strategy should be:
- What do you want to accomplish with your blog?
Blogs can be used for so many different purposes it’s impossible to list them all but, for example: Do you want to increase your brand’s awareness? Provide information to your audience? Make your business more relatable to your clients?
A good blog can help you do all of these things and so much more, but you need to write for these purposes in order for it to be successful! You should never write content just for the sake of writing content; if you want to increase brand awareness, write about your brand and target your posts to the appropriate audience. If you’re simply trying to provide valuable information to your audience, therefore making your business more relatable, give people something they actually want to read! If you own a shoe company your customers want to learn more about anything and everything related to shoes, not what you did over the weekend. - What do you want people to get out of your blog?
A blog can do everything from teaching people more about your business and brand, to giving insight as to what is going on within the company or local community, to providing valuable information to clients on things related to your business, and so on. When starting your blog you need to determine if you want to use it to do one of these things, a few of them, or even all of them.
People will read your blog because they are interested in what you have to say; you need to figure out who your audience is, determine what they want and need to read, and write to fill those gaps. - How are you going to make your blog stand out?
Like I said before, everyone knows they need a blog, which means that there are countless other blogs out there that could be putting out content very similar to yours. This does not, by any means, mean that you shouldn’t start one of those similar blogs just because the information could already be out there! Maybe you’re biggest competitor has an amazing blog and is writing about all of the topics you would write about; use that to your advantage! All you have to do is make your blog stand out, make it the blog that the audience that loves shoes (or whatever the market may be, you get it) wants to read, the blog that they will consistently go back to for great content.
One great way to make your blog stand out is with video. If you include a video, or even record a video blog, people will remember that.
You want to be a reliable resource for your clients, and you want to be your blog to be a trusted source of information that your customers can keep going back to for more.
So, what do you want your blog to do for your business and your customers? Take those answers and run with them to start changing your blogging strategy today!
– Alli Myers