We are fans of best practices. We are also fans of sharing. Thus, we’d like to share with you some blogging best practices.
Recently I was asked to start writing a weekly blog for our website and let me tell you, I’m no writer. Sure, I’ve kept journals and can write a mean Facebook status update, but a blog?! No way José, leave that to the professionals!
As marketers, we are communication experts and we write blogs to share our expertise with our buyer personas and to generate traffic with the hope of converting leads. Buyer personas are representations of your ideal customer based real data about your existing customers. When creating content for your buyer persona, consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Without further ado, I present to you some of the best practices I’ve picked up in my business blogging experience.
- Don’t be scared of writing: You speak English right? You’ll be fineee. When I started writing I realized it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be because despite the idea of ‘business blogging’, I still had the freedom to show my personality in my writing. Instead of shying away from the assignment I decided to take Nike’s advice and ‘Just Do It.’ In this case, however, I switched it up to, ‘Just Write It.’ Get it out on paper in a natural, relatable way that your readers will easily understand. Take my advice and ‘Just Write It.’
- Write with empathy: Being empathetic allows you to address your audience’s pain points and to solve their problems. It allows you to relate to your reader. To be empathetic requires you to have a good understanding of your buyer persona. Know what keeps those you’re writing to up at night, their pain points, their values and their goals. Address those issues to help to guide them in their buyer journey.
- Don’t hide your personality: The best part about blogging is that you get to be you! You have a personality and so does your business. Allow your readers, customers, and potential customers, get to know you. Blogging shouldn’t be confused with essay style writing. Blogs should be informative and content rich, but should be light on the tone.
- Experiment with various CTA’s: Blogging is an informal way to reach a target audience. Explore using various combinations of call-to-actions (CTAs). The side bar in blogs seems to have become ‘white noise’ over the years. Readers have learned to ignore the sidebar due a mixture of advertising and information found there. Experiment with A/B testing by comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better to decide which CTA is performing best and where on the page they are getting the most form fills.
- Encourage employees to blog: Keep blog posts fresh by having a variety of people contribute to your blog feed. A variety of voices keep things interesting for subscribers. Good writers read a variety of material to keep their topics interesting, but because as marketers we don’t always have an english degree hung on the wall, get each team member to contribute a blog. This allows a variety of interests and information will be drawn out.
Blogging for your business is a fundamental part of inbound marketing, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Blogging is a way to share your expertise with your visitors and to prove to them that you are experts in the industry. Humanizing your expertise and connect with target market.
Best of luck blogging!
If you’re interested in learning more about generating website traffic through blogging we invite you to download our eBook Alaniz Guide to Generating Website Traffic, Leads & Sales. Please get in touch if there’s anything we can help with!
