As someone who writes for multiple blogs, let me be the first to say that sustaining a successful blogging campaign is often challenging. Most people find writing difficult to do well, and it is, but for a blog the writing aspect will not necessarily be your biggest obstacle. Rather, it is how well you set up your process (what I like to call your “blog factory”) that will determine your long-term success. I like to use the word “factory” because it invokes the idea that each individual blog post goes through stages before it emerges as a finished piece. A blogger’s “factory” is quintessential—it is what ensures that you will produce blogs on a consistent basis. Before you even write your first article, you need to form that blogging system.
- Begin with a Strategy; What Is Your Goal?
A blog campaign must have a purpose in order to get anywhere. What do you want to happen as a result of your blog: better SEO for your website? More leads, customers and referrals? Providing a place for your customers to get to know you and your company? Your goals could include raising website traffic, proving your expertise, building your reliability, increasing social visibility and interaction with your company.
- Write to Your Audience
The most important question to ask yourself before creating a blog is ‘who is my audience?’ The answer will depend on your goals above. In other words, your audience is the people you want to reach: your customers and the customers you want to have. Think about what your audience is looking for: why do they need your help? What is your expertise that they don’t have? Deciding what you want your blog to say in a broad sense of how will it contribute to the reader will help you keep your message focused, and make brainstorming ideas easier. If you don’t have a focus, anything goes, and consequently you write about anything and everything, ultimately not providing any value to your audience.
- Create a Content Calendar—and stick to it!
What solves the problem of your factory-wheels lying dormant is a content calendar. It’s a beautiful thing! Fall in love with calendars because they will save your blog. Without them, it’s like driving without a map. Your blog either has nowhere to go, or it doesn’t know where it’s headed. Calendars will keep you on track, producing content at regular intervals so you can meet your goals. Is there anything magical about a content calendar? Nope. A content calendar is just a regular old calendar (Google app, Trello board, piece of paper you found) marked with the days when you will post a blog and the topics you want to write about. It’s a regular, essential piece of equipment.
- Push it out!
Writing content is most of the battle, but you can’t achieve your goals if nobody sees your blog! You need to put your posts somewhere people can see and interact with them. Social media platforms allow you to reach a larger, more general audience than just your customers. What platforms you choose (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Houzz) will depend on your audience again. Where are they active? Where will they most likely check out your content? A good way to investigate social media platforms is to create an account for yourself, explore, and see what people are using it for. Facebook is a great place to bring out the personality of your business, sharing events and activities. Pinterest lends itself to sharing neat ideas and products. Following other companies’ efforts isn’t a bad idea either. Let others inspire you; learn from their successes and mistakes.
Social media reaches a mass of people both new and familiar, but to stay more personally connected you can use enewsletters to reach your current, past and potential customer’s inboxes. Enewsletters remind them about you, showing that you are still active and available when they have need of your services again.
Your process will keep your blog going when things get busy and you are distracted. A well-established blogging system, with clear goals and a defined audience, will help you write content that provides your readers with quality information, giving them a reason to visit your website, interact with you and learn more about your company.
