Did you know that 65% of B2B companies are using blogs to grow their business? Content marketing is fast becoming the preferred method for businesses to share their knowledge, strengthen their brand, and secure their positions as thought leaders in an industry. Blogging, done correctly, is central to an effective content marketing strategy. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the best practices to make sure your blog is pulling its weight and spreading your company’s message.
Catchy Blog Titles
The first step to writing a blog that people want to read is writing a catchy title that will demand attention. Just as you may struggle with an email subject line, a blog title needs to be short and sweet and peak the reader’s interest enough to click through. There are a number of ways to do this depending on the type of blog you’re publishing. In the case of this post, we’re trying to teach you something new. As such, we started the title with “How To…” You can also include phrases such as “Tips and Tricks”, “Best Practice”, or “Top 10 Ways To…”
Another option is to create a list. Numbers catch people’s attention and can easily be combined with the instructional titles mentioned above.
Consider the following:
5 Tips for Content Marketing Success
3 Things You Need to Stop Doing
7 Ways to Reach Your Target Audience
Check out this post for more tips on writing a brilliant blog title
Pretty Pictures
We may not be 6 years old and reading picture books anymore, but let’s face it, pretty pictures make anything more appealing. Using featured pictures and images can differentiate your content from similar posts and helps to create a visually memorable experience. This blog by Facebook expert Jon Loomer is a great example of how to use images to enhance your text. In a bid to create a memorable experience, try to stay away from stock images…nothing about a stock image is memorable, other than the message that you’re team isn’t overly creative.
Additionally, be mindful that you have the legal rights to your images. Just because you found an image on Google doesn’t mean its fair game. Buying an image license will always be cheaper than a lawsuit.
SEO is critical
You can’t be a marketer without a basic understanding of SEO. You may not need to understand it 100% but you do need to know how to write a blog that is optimized for SEO. If you’re blog is on WordPress, take advantage of plugins such as Yoast that guide you in writing an optimized post. Here are some basic tips to get you started:
Make sure your keyword gets traffic but doesn’t have a lot of competition
Include your keyword in the beginning of your blog title, URL, title tags, meta data, and multiple times in your article
Write at least 300 words, preferably closer to 500
Have approximately 1 SEO friendly hyperlink for every 120 words
Use blog tags judiciously – tags help but adding too many similar tags can negatively affect your rank
Link To Related Content
Effective linking has multiple benefits and should never be disregarded. For one, it shows you know how to curate content and find the best information on the web. It also let’s you direct your traffic to older posts so that you don’t have to discuss the same ideas over and over again.
Additionally, the SEO benefits are many. Moz.com’s beginners guide to SEO explains how linking is done and why that matters to you:
“For search engines that crawl the web, links are the streets between pages. Using sophisticated link analysis, the engines can discover how pages are related to each other and in what ways.”
Linking out helps connect your blog to other pages. Additionally, as people see you are linking to them, they will in turn link to you. The more links to your site, they better ranking you’ll get.
Make it Easy to Share
If you want people to share your blog, make it easy to share. Use social sharing buttons so people can easily spread your awesome content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit, and the countless other social networking sites out there. You’ve spent the time to create a great post, so make sure your readers can spread the love!
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