It’s true. Your blog is boring, irrelevant, self-promoting and did we say boring?
Let us put it this way: Do you have that friend that always talks about themselves? Do they listen to you? Care about your feedback?
If you want to have a successful blog that engages, inspires and educates – then you need to be entertaining, relevant and funny.
Here are a few suggestions:
- Tie into current events. Just recently we wrote a blog about Women’s History Month which is happening now. We talked about the women that inspire us and profiled them and their accomplishments. Is this relevant to marketing? Nope, but it sure is interesting.
- What questions do you constantly get from customers or prospective customers? If you have clients asking how to construct a press release, then write a blog on it. This is obviously a topic of interest so you know it will be read.
- Have a strategy. Map out content themes, whether it is staff profiles, industry topics segmented by service offerings, national happenings, etc. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be flexible, you want to be sure to offer your thoughts on industry events as they come up. Here is a great template through HubSpot.
- Have a call-to-action or provide value with additional information. For example, we suggested a content strategy, which is why we linked to a template – we are adding additional value.
- Entertain. We live in a world where a person’s attention span is now about 140 characters. So how do you keep someone reading until the end? Have visuals that illustrate your point instead of droning on and on. Also, use humor. Here is a funny blog (at least we think it is) that Kim wrote on trolling.
The biggest thing standing in your way of success is ignoring your customers and not listening. Use social media to poll your audience on what advice or information they want. We regularly review our content calendar and make updates based on what content is performing better.
What have you found to be successful?
