Do…produce blogs regularly. You’ll have to define exactly what the word ‘regularly’ means to you. For Hubspot it means 5 – 7 orginal blogs each day. That’s extraordinary, and very few companies can produce that level of content. For us, ‘regularly’ used to mean 3 blogs a week, it now means 3 blogs a day. And that has resulted in increased traffic for us.
Do…track analytics for your blog. You should track the total traffic to your blog. That’s obvious. But you should also track organic traffic, direct traffic, and referral traffic to your blog. These are critical metrics. We noted massive increases in traffic to our blog as we increased the volume of content we produced. Organic traffic, especially, spiked.
Do…believe Google when they say that content is king. Google has made it extraordinarily clear that content produces SEO results. You’ll remember that during our content push we actually fired our SEO firm. They simply weren’t generating results for us. They just weren’t. So we fired them. Since we’ve fired them, ever meaningful metric has increased. Why? Because of content. Content is driving traffic to our site. Most of that traffic is now organic. People are finding us on Google more than they ever have.
Do…create a blog calendar. If you are going to blog regularly, you need to have titles and topics in mind, and in writing, before you start the process. Simply sitting down at a computer with the goal to ‘blog more’ isn’t enough. You need to create a speadsheet that has blog titles and even a short outline about what the blog will discuss. You should create this blog calendar well before you start writing.
Do…create content that is high quality.
Do…create blogs quickly. It shouldn’t take someone 5 hours to create a blog. Content marketing won’t be worthwhile if a blog takes that long to produce. It, maybe, should take that long to produce a White Paper or a very in-depth case study. But to produce a blog should take 20-60 minutes dependent upon the topic and the technical nature of the content. If you’re considering hiring someone to write blogs full-time, make sure this person can write quickly. That’s the number one consideration before you hire them.
Do…promote your blogs via social media. Every blog should be shared on every company social media platform. Every blog should also be shared by key employees, executives and fans. Build a following with useful content.
Do…talk openly in your blog. Don’t get bogged down in formalistic writing. Conversational is better.
Do…talk about your target audience’s fears, problems, and issues. Try to solve these problems in your blog. They don’t care about you. They care about themselves. They care about lowering risk, quelling fears, and solving their problems. They care about learning how to do new things.
Don’t…let your blog consume you. When we started writing 3 blogs a day it felt like a daunting task. Now, we simply produce all of our blogs on Monday or Tuesday each week. Then we have the rest of the week to get other work done. Don’t let your blog take every waking moment of your day. That’s a bad idea.
Don’t…worry if you get no engagement on your blog. No one will comment on your blog for several months. No one will share your content for several months. No one will notice that you’re writing for several months. Keep it up.
Don’t…give up. Blogging is hard. Don’t stop until it works. Focus on your target audience and eventually people will start reading it.
Don’t…worry about critical comments on your blog. Readers will say rude things. Evaluate their criticism but don’t let it destroy you.
Don’t…feel like every blog has to win a Pulitzer prize. It doesn’t. Some blogs are merely going to answer a few questions, or address a controversial topic, or provide a how to list. Proofread your blogs, but don’t edit them until they’re a novel.
Don’t…write blogs that are too long.
Don’t…write blogs that are too short. 600-1000 words is ideal.
