Have you been tasked with writing a blog post? Or perhaps you’re looking to start one for your company?
Before you start, you should probably read these five best practices.
1. Write for your audience, not for yourself
While blogging is an excellent tool for brand presence and SEO, you’ll reap the best results if you gear your blog toward your audience, not yourself or your company.
Your audience doesn’t want to read about you; they want to learn something! Not to mention, Google’s helpful content update makes it more important than ever to create content that’s helpful for readers and not just promotional.
If you create a blog filled with actionable tidbits and insightful thoughts, you can build a community of loyal readers. Don’t get me wrong, you can 100% still include information about your company within your blogs, but don’t make it all about yourself.
Your pieces should also be easy to read. Make key takeaways obvious and break up your text with lists, headings, and bullet points.
2. Include internal and external links
Find ways to incorporate internal and external links within your blogs. Not only are they helpful for your readers, but it’s an SEO best practice!
The anchor text is whatever group of words you choose to highlight to make the link visible. For example, the “SEO best practice” and “Google’s helpful content update” you see above. Choosing the anchor text is up to you, but it should give readers an idea of the content they’ll see when clicking the link.
If your company has key phrases, use those phrases within your blog and link them to another part of your website. If your company doesn’t have key phrases, be sure to ask us about SEO.
Pro tip: When uploading your blogs onto your website, choose the “open in new tab” option when inserting links. This option makes it so readers won’t leave your page after clicking the link.
3. Don’t forget about the title tag and meta description
We’re taking another trip to SEO land! Title tags and meta descriptions are essential tools in SEO strategies. Any page uploaded to your site, including blogs, should include a title tag and meta description.
Your title tag (seen in purple) is the title of a webpage and should be around 55-70 characters. Your meta description, which describes the page, should be a maximum of 140 characters.
4. Share it with the world
Once you’ve created and uploaded your blog, don’t just leave it there! How will people know you posted it?!
There are many ways to share your blog, and it really depends on your company, but one great way is through social media. Whatever platforms you use, share your content with your followers.
Another avenue to take is through email. If your company has a newsletter, create a section that includes your latest blog posts, or you could also include older posts. These older posts could be some of your more popular posts that seem to resonate with your audience or ones that didn’t do too hot and you’d like to give another shot.
Either way, you worked hard on your blog posts, don’t let them slowly wither away on your site because you didn’t share them.
5. Go back and repurpose
Consistently creating content is hard, so if you can find ways to repurpose your blog content, it’ll make your marketing life much easier!
There are many ways to repurpose content. If you have a shorter piece with actionable takeaways, create a checklist graphic or infographic and post it on your social media accounts. If you have a series of blog posts on the same topic, combine them into a whitepaper. Then, you could use the whitepaper as gated content for lead generation.
The options are endless but should align with your brand and your goals.
Let blogging experts take it off your hands
Another option is to let a healthcare marketing firm with a team of content marketing experts take blogs off your hands entirely.
Whatever your marketing needs (really, we do it all), we’d love to see how we can help.
