Do you have a blog? For many companies, it is an excellent way of sharing news, advice and professional tips. Giving your clientele a way to learn, or pick up valuable advice. It will help you build your brand, reputation as a professional, and it will help to build your readership. Blog followers turn in to customers.
The worst thing to do is let your blog go stale, quiet, or worst of all, remain languishing in a dusty corner of your website, unread and unseen. Keeping a blog healthy is not difficult, and does not need to be time consuming. The goal is to develop your voice, build a rapport with your readers, and let the personality of the blogger, and the company brand, shine through.
Here are some quick tips to help you keep your blog followers engaged and interested.
Your blog should look up to date, fresh and well kept. Aim for at least one weekly update, two to three is better. Give your followers something to look forward to, something to follow, and something to surprise them with. Visually it needs to change its look and feel fairly regularly too. Using different images, backgrounds and varying the sizes of articles are all effective ways.
Post regularly, and don’t be afraid of creating weekly slots. If you follow other industry blogs, you will notice that many of them have a ‘White-board Friday’ blog series. We have a ‘hints and tips’ series. This article belongs to that series. Breakdown your week and develop a couple of innovative and interesting series that your readers will find interesting, and be inclined to follow. The worst thing to do is be inconsistent. Posting every day for a week, and then ignoring your blog for months reduces its popularity and you’ll lose followers. If this happens you’re better to delete the old blog and start again. The more regularly you post, the more opportunities you will create for two-way communication with your readership.
Be cautious of loading adverts onto your blog. For many people adverts provide excellent revenue. They receive payment every time a reader clicks on an advert visible from their blog. It’s not our place to comment on whether there should be adverts or not, we’ll simply say that when it comes to adverts, less is more. Try to have adverts which are complimentary to your own brand, and try not to allow adverts which spoil the design and look of your blog. It is well know that one thing users dislike is being bombarded with adverts and flashing pay per clicks as soon as they arrive on a page.
Finally, be professional. Make sure the blog posts are written perfectly, using the correct language, grammar and punctuation. If your blog has an international audience choose UK or US English, but whichever one you use, stick to it, don’t chop and change. Use attractive and clever images which enhance the articles, and always proof read it before you publish.
Good luck with your blog! If you have any blogging tips, we’d love to hear them.
