A blog on your company website can help you attract a wider audience to your brand while building credibility. All you have to do is get people reading your blog. It sounds simple enough, right?
Once you get the ball rolling, a blog can work wonders; the hard part is setting off in the first place. If you’re not getting the engagement you think you deserve, it could be because you aren’t pitching it right.
That’s why we have compiled these quick tips to getting more views for your blog. Follow them and your blog could soon be snowballing to success…
Keep your content relevant
It should go without saying that your blog posts should be relevant to what your company does. If you bake cakes, it’s probably best not to start talking about the best way to kill household vermin. It may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised to see what people come up with when they start to run out of steam!
Start with the basics: how, what, where, when and why.
Answer the questions that you think your customer will be asking. Write about what they would want to come to you about in the first place: for example, a furniture restorer might write about restoring a dog-chewed table. It shows what types of jobs you do, as well as how well you can do it!
On days when inspiration doesn’t strike, don’t be afraid about going over old territory. Share stories of similar work you’ve done, or go into more detail on a topic you’ve already talked about.
On a company blog, readers are coming to you for information on how you can help them.
Hit the mark with your topic
A great way to see what you should be writing about is to think about what your customers are searching for.
The whole idea behind a blog is to draw people to your website through search engines and social media, so you need to show them what they want to see.
Google Trends is a great tool to use when coming up with topics. You can see how popular a search term is over a given time period as well as what areas it has been most popular it is.
For coming up with ideas, type in a general topic and scroll down to where it says ‘related queries’. This will help you to see what people have been searching for, to give you an idea of how to help them.
To see how niche your topic is, just perform a simple Google search to see if anyone else has already written what you have.
It’s okay to go over similar ground, but it’s best to try and find a way to be better than your competitors. To do this, try to add another layer to your topic. For example, instead of writing about ‘how to crochet’, write about ‘how to crochet with thick yarn’.
It’s worth having a mix of short-term and long-term (or ‘evergreen’) content.
Each post on the internet has a lifespan. For Twitter, it’s around 2 hours; on Facebook, it’s roughly 3.
Blog posts depend on the topic. You can write about up-to-date topical matters to generate a lot of views over a long period of time. Evergreen content, however, is designed to be SEO optimized so that people keep clicking on it and reading it — possibly for the next few years.
Optimise your posts
Many people forget the basics of blogging: to maximize your readership, you need to optimise your posts. This means it not only needs to contain the right information, be the right length AND hit the right SEO marks. You also need to post regularly.
Everyone on the internet agrees that the length of your posts is important, they just can’t agree what that length should actually be. You’ll see advice that tells you your posts should be anything from 200 to 2000 words long.
What we know is that 69% of professional bloggers are writing posts that are longer than 1,000 words.
Additionally, according to CopyPress, long-form content outperforms short form content by around 40.54%.
Don’t worry if you’re feeling a bit daunted by writing huge posts each time. Start off with shorter posts to ease yourself and get familiar with your topics and writing about them.
Aim for around 750-1000 words to start off, then check to see how the content performs on your analytics. If you’re finding that you are underperforming, try to adjust the length of your posts to find something that works.
When we say you need to post regularly, we don’t mean every hour, day or week — we just mean that you need to be consistent.
For some reason across the internet, people have decided that there is some kind of golden number of posts per month you need to put out in order to maximize your readership. This isn’t true! Of course more posts are more likely to get you a bigger audience, however, it’s no use posting 20 times a month if these readers aren’t generating sales.
Analytics will be your best friend, so it’s vital that you set up an account before you get started. Keep an eye on what works for you and what doesn’t.
Include images in your posts
It’s sad but true — people are lazy when it comes to reading online content. There are plenty of interesting, attention-grabbing, easy-reading blog posts out there. So why would they read something that looks time-consuming and dull?
Including images in your posts is a great way of capturing your audience’s attention and conveying your message in another medium. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?
They also break up your content, making your post easier to digest for readers. Nobody wants a wall of text!
When you’re deciding which images to include in your post, there are a few things you need to remember. Firstly, as with your content, your images must be relevant. They need to support your text and add value to your post — so they must match up with your topic.
Secondly, you should avoid poor quality, blurry images. Bad images are detrimental to your blog, as they make you look lazy and unprofessional. Always use sharp, high-quality images.
If you want appropriate photos but you’re on a budget, then take a look at some high-quality stock image sites like Burst. You can pick up photos that look natural (and instagrammable!) to illustrate your post. In case you don’t have a budget, you can also find a lot of excellent sites for free stock photos.
You can also use online tools like Canva or Design Wizard to edit images and make them your own by adding your own branding and colour pallet. You might like to create infographics to illustrate any stats you’ve used in your post too.
Furthermore, you can additionally grab people’s attention by creating high-quality and engaging video content. For example, free online video editing tools such as Veed can help you tell your story and grow your audience with little to no training required and with Type Studio you can add automatic subtitles to your videos to get higher interaction rates.
Be proactive with social and emails
To really get more people reading your blog, you need to advertise it on more than just search engines. Social media and email marketing will help you to catch people’s eyes and draw them to your content.
Email marketing is an underestimated tool when it comes to blogging. You can compile and manage an email list according to your needs, and send out emails with either a single link or multiple on the same topic.
Create an email marketing campaign: this will help you to build relationships with your readers and generate leads. (And if you’re not sure how to go about this, use an email marketing tool to help you plan your campaign and bulk-send automated emails).
Need more inspiration? Check out this great post on fostering engagement on social media for inspiration.
Send out emails with a frequency that matches how often you post. If you’re not posting weekly, there’s no point in sending out a weekly newsletter. Try not to bombard your readers – monthly or bi-monthly should be enough to make an impact.
Share each post on your social channels too, using the relevant hashtags and media. Don’t be afraid to share posts more than once using different captions and pictures to maximize the number of impressions you can get.
If you’re worried about not having enough time to keep up with regular posting and responses, then you should definitely get a social media marketing tool like Buffer. It’ll help you schedule posts and come up with a content calendar, as well as monitoring engagement and when your users are most active.
Conclusion
Use all the tools available to you and you’ll be able to grow the readership of your blog.
Email marketing, analytics and Google Trends are all things you should be using to create the best blog you can. Many bloggers and companies take the approach of ‘if you build it, they will come’; unfortunately, you’re going to have to be a bit more proactive than that.
Work hard, use our advice and you will see results!
About the Author:
Victoria Greene is a freelance writer and branding consultant with a passion for ecommerce business. Check out her blog, Victoria Ecommerce, for all the latest on developments in ecommerce, marketing, and design.