Why blog?
Creating and maintaining a blog can be time consuming and expensive. Before getting your own blog off the ground, ask yourself what it is that you want to achieve.
In many ways, a blog can serve more than more purpose. It could be an opportunity to source traffic and leads through organic search, broadcast company news updates or engage with customers over time.
Content categories
First, identify the broad content categories your blog should address. If your focus in on generating leads, sales or conversions from organic search, run keyword research to identity the words that your prospects use online. Look beyond keywords with strong commercial intent to consider the full keyword spectrum from the start to the final stages of the buying cycle. Unlike an online store, a blog is an opportunity to connect with customers across all stages of the buying cycle, from awareness through to consideration and purchase.
Blog posts on Barack Obama’s blog tend to fall in one of the following categories:
- Reasons to vote
- Spotlight on volunteers at work
- News from the presidential campaign trail
- Products available on the BarackObama.com online store
Post frequency
Next, consider how often to post – set a daily, weekly or monthly target. Whatever posting frequency you run with, aim for consistency to keep your audience and search engines coming back.
You might want to build flexibility into your calendar, for example increasing the frequency of posts in the run-up to the holiday or shopping season to maximise your presence in search engine results, even if it means posting a little less frequently after that.
If this sounds overwhelming, don’t let this curb your enthusiasm. Strategies exist to minimise the time and effort it takes to create fresh compelling content without compromising on quality – leverage user generated content from your social media outlets, curate content written by others or compile the most popular posts on your blog in weekly round-ups.
Content calendar
A content calendar should answer a simple question: who posts what when? For each of the content categories you’ve identified, choose an angle and a posting frequency. You can make this as easy or as complex as you like. For example, a recipe website could post their recipe of the week every Friday, share pictures of user bake-offs on Mondays and review of a new kitchen appliance on the first and third Wednesday of the month.
Barack Obama’s blog takes content calendars to a whole new level. This is a snapshot of the blog’s content calendar and by no means an exhaustive overview:
| Category | Subject | Frequency | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| Volunteers at work | Picture of the day | Daily | Author 1 |
| Volunteers at work | Tweet of the day | Daily | Author 1 |
| Volunteers at work | Spotlight on a volunteer | Weekly | Author 2 |
| Other | Weekly wrap-up | Weekly | Author 1 |
| Presidential campaign trail | Excerpts from the President’s speed | Ad hoc | Author 2 |
Style guide
If you’re the only contributor to your blog, you’ll find a suitable tone of voice in no time at all.
However, inconsistencies can quickly surface when more than one person holds the pen. This is true whether you’re working across a multiple-author blog or a social media profile. For this reason, it helps to follow a style guide to ensure a consistent tone of voice and shared editorial styles – across capitalisation, punctuation, dates, article structure and much more. The BBC’s style guide and the Economist’s style guides are good places to start if you need inspiration.
Unique content
The simple rule is that there is no set rule when it comes to article length and SEO. Write for users first and search engines should follow. If anything, writing content with the same word length across posts could raise concerns with search engines.
Importantly, the content you post should be unique to your website. You should avoid copying content from other parts of the web, including PDF or Word documents, without proper attribution. Duplicate content can harm your search engine rankings even if it is found on a small number of pages.
A tip for power users: if you have legitimate reasons to replicate content from other websites, solutions exist in the form of the cross-domain rel=”canonical” tag.
Rich media
It’s no secret that Facebook, Twitter and Google+ place considerable emphasis on pictures in users’ news feeds. A picture instantly draws the eye and can engage users in seconds.
However, SEO best practices still apply. If a post is structured around a picture, make sure to describe the picture in the body of text, name the file in a descriptive manner and populate the image’s ALT tag with a short description. Likewise, if the focus of your post is a video, it’s a good idea to provide a transcript below to help search engines understand the focus of the page.
Where next?
Don’t leave your readers hanging at the end of a blog post. Provide opportunities for them to engage with your content, product or service. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to achieving this. If you’re a publisher keen to drive page impressions, direct readers towards related, popular or recent stories. If you’re an ecommerce player blogging about Ugg boot buying tips, you could link through to popular brands and products from the body of the article.
