Blogs are an effective asset to many content marketing strategies in 2021. If you aren’t blogging in 2021, you aren’t really doing content marketing…
Many people are unaware of when and why blogs came to be. Truth is, the term actually originates from “weblog”, which was shortened by Peter Merholz.
Content Marketing is the unsung hero for many digital marketing campaigns. It doesn’t have the same swagger as Social Media Marketing or the same fame as SEO, but it does have the same impact – sometimes better.
The end goal for the digital marketing strategy is to ultimately provide value to your customers and web traffic. Connecting with this audience naturally is so important today and is often overlooked – however, the benefits of honing in on your campaign will definitely be worth it in the long haul.
Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don’t blog.
Writing blogs is also an effective way to build your backlink profile and social media presence. From your blog content, you will be able to create social content surrounding similar topics with the same information – killing two birds with one stone (This will also drive traffic to your blog post). If you are writing high-quality content, you will organically generate build links. When other blog or content writers reference you as a source, Google sees this and considers you an authoritative figure and boosts your rankings.
This brings me to my Top 5 Tips for Writing Blogs:
- Provide Actionable Value
- Use Imagery and Don’t Be Boring
- Write Content for Humans
- Use Lists (Like This One)
- Include Statistics
Provide Actionable Value
What should the key focus of your blog be? To provide value to your target audience – this is the only correct answer. Always have the primary goal of informing and educating your readers. A great blog will attract attention organically, so when you are writing a blog provide solutions and content that the audience will want to read and share.
Use Imagery – Don’t Be Boring
You might think this one is easy – you’d be wrong. It might seem that way, but it certainly is not. Being a naturally entertaining writer is very rare, and can be a hard task to master. Spend the extra time on your blog to entertain, make it fun, and try to have the reader enjoy the content.
Images, GIFs, and Videos are all super important to your blog. Nobody wants to be reading off what looks like a blank word document. Specifically, video content is becoming more and more pivotal in modern-day marketing – and almost essential in a content marketing strategy from now on.
Articles with relevant imagery receive 94% more views than articles without.
Write Content for Humans, Not Search Engines
Write for humans first, not search engines. It is common for content writers to try and outsmart the search engines to jump up rankings – however, that’s not how it works. Unfortunately, the search engines are smarter than you… Just kidding… Unless?
Fine, search engines might not be smarter than you – but you won’t outsmart them, that’s for sure. The Google algorithm continually uses human input to further its understanding of how humans operate and use Google – making it smarter and smarter, day-by-day. Today, it is impractical to attempt to outsmart the search engine giant through any loopholes.
Remember to always prioritise your users – write content for your audience, then search engines.
Use Lists
Ironically, we have put together a list of why lists are great:
- Consumable Information
Lists create a section of information that is easily digestible for the reader – they can be skimmed to generate a basic snippet of ideas.
- Easy to Write
Writing out a list is simple; don’t overthink it. It’s an easy way to organise thoughts and reduce the formality of a piece of text while inserting humour.
- Provide Representations
A list is a super effective way to demonstrate the hierarchy or order of informational points. However, this doesn’t always have to be the case.
- Search Visibility
Lists are also very searchable and can be very beneficial to generate traffic. This is done through snippets. Snippets are the box that shows up at the top of the first page of results – lists are a great way to feature here.
Include Statistics
Oh, you want to know our personal favourite statistic.
Here it is: 100% of Blogs SHOULD include stats
People love stats, they just do. So, the more you can incorporate relevant statistics throughout your content the better – but don’t overdo it. Stats are very rememberable and generate great backlinks through references to your blog.
For example, which of these is easy to remember:
On average, companies who blog produce 67% more leads per month.
Companies who blog get more leads than companies that don’t.
It’s obvious… Right?
Blog = Content King
As Google continues to get smarter and build its understanding of humans, blogging and content marketing are only going to become more important so get on top of it now.
And, always remember your main goal when writing blogs, provide value!