10 Tips to Take Your Blog & Social Media to the Next Level
Are you wondering why you should focus on blogging when there are so many social media options for today’s marketers? It’s because blogs should be at the heart of your social media marketing.
Need more reasons to persuade you? Blogging yields 79% more Twitter followers and attracted 97% more links for businesses, according to Hubspot’s research. These elements in turn improved social media and search optimization results.
Here are ten tips to make your blog a powerhouse and achieve your objectives in a measurable way.
- Be positive. Do you want to listen to or be around someone who’s always negative or complaining? Hubspot found the use of positive content was more shareable. Where possible, recast your content to be upbeat. You want to be that ray of sunshine in your readers’ lives.
- Focus on your readers’ needs, not yours. As with any other form of social media, blogging isn’t about you as in “enough about me, what do you think about me?” It’s about talking to your audience and their hopes, goals and needs in your unique blogging voice. Without readers, you’re just talking to yourself.
- Provide useful, unique information. If your blog is filled with rehashed, filler content readers can find elsewhere, why should people come to your blog? Readers look for insights they can use in their daily lives, whether it’s for work or their personal lives.
- Chose your words carefully. When it comes to blog content, the words you select matter and have a significant impact on readership, inbound links and sharing. Based on Hubspot’s research, the words insights, analysis and answers work best for views.
- Use good grammar. Just because blogs allow you to create and publish content in real-time doesn’t entitle you to have poor grammar. This is particularly true if you’re writing a business or professional blog because sloppy content reflects poorly on your brand.
- Improve search optimization. In your blog posts, focus on the keywords for which you want to be found. Improve the context of your keywords for on-page search: page title is most effective place for keywords, use keywords in headings and content, and use the blog post description to convince searchers to read your content.
- Build search authority through link usage. According to SEOmoz, the top 15% of all webpages have seven links. Link to the keywords in your blog post. Based on research by Hubspot, the most linked to words are recent, insights and soon.
- Expand the use of call-to-action in every blog post. Call-to-action isn’t one size fits all. It must be specific to the content and context where the call-to-action appears. Further, don’t limit them to the end of blog posts, especially if you link to product pages on your website in the body of your post. Add calls-to-action to other areas of your blog like your about page or location page. Your goal should be to get prospects to take the next step in the purchase process.
- Use social sharing buttons. Since social sharing buttons expand your readership, don’t limit them just to blog posts and articles. Think other places where readers may want to share your information, such as your post-email sign up page.
- Create remarkable content. This means writing must-read blog posts that stand out from the crowd. These posts take time and effort to complete and often require additional research. Therefore, they are hard to post on a continual basis. Schedule such pieces well in advance. Hubspot, for example, uses one of these featured posts every month.
By incorporating these suggestions into your blog’s editorial calendar, you can improve the effectiveness of your blog and achieve your business goals. If using all of these suggestions seems daunting, then adapt those that are easiest for you so that you feel that you’re making progress.
Do you have any other suggestions to help other bloggers become blogging powerhouses? Please share what’s working on your blog.
Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Tip of my hat to Mike Volpe of Hubspot who inspired this post with his presentation at the Conversation Conference.
Here are some other articles that you may find interesting.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/imagesbywestfall/3896838102/