Stephanie Donelson

Note: This is an edited version of an article I previously posted on LinkedIn.

Blogging is a great content marketing tactic and a fun one at that, I think. It can take some time to get your brand voice down and establish a consistent content production schedule, but once you do, you can enjoy the benefits of business blogging by reaching new customers, helping customers through their buyer’s journey, and retain customers beyond the sale.

If you’re investing more into your blogging efforts this year, here are 14 blogging tips and tricks and best practices to follow to get the most out your company’s blog.

1. Set a realistic schedule

An important component of any marketing tactic is consistency. Once you’ve established your posting schedule, consumers are going to expect you to stick with it, or as closely to it as possible.

If you have a few writers on your team, you can probably get away with posting a few times a week whereas if you’re the only one posting, it might be better to start off slow with only one post a week or every other week to ensure you have time to write quality, relevant posts.

It’s better to post good content less often, than bad content frequently.

2. Organize your posts

As you develop your schedule, you’ll also want to start organizing your posts and post topics. An industry standard is to use an editorial calendar to keep you on schedule and help outline topics in advance so you’re not struggling to come up with something to write the day the blog should be going live.

Include a healthy mix of topics and blog types in your calendar. For example, avoid having all of your posts follow the list format or interview format. Change it up!

While you’re at it, learn how to create a strong blogging editorial calendar!

3. Optimize your posts

As you create your posts, make sure to optimize them for SEO. This can be done by including relevant keyword terms, meta data, alt tags, and links to other content on your site or links to external sites if you’re referencing their data or a quote.

When it comes to your primary keyword term, try to make it as natural sounding as possible and get it in your first paragraph of your blog!

4. Focus on long-form content

While it can be daunting to write 500+ words for your content, you really should try to focus on long-form content as much as possible for your blog. Long-form content tends to rank higher and generally has all the information the searcher is looking for, meaning they’ll stay on your website longer and hopefully click onto another page to continue reading your great content.

5. Use images

When’s the last time you scrolled through a post that was just text? Bet you started scrolling a little bit faster, looking for images to help break up the content or act as an aid to the content. Images help add breaks to your wall of text and keeps people engaged as we process images much faster than words.

Use quality images throughout your post to make your blogs more visually appealing. You should always have a header image as well to set the tone of the blog and make it easier to share on social media as sites like Facebook and Twitter grab your header image to appear with your link.

6. Check your work

Always, always double-check your work or ask for help in proofing your blog before publishing it! Not only should you check for grammar and spelling errors, but you should also be double checking any facts or statistics you’re sharing.

Try to do your editing a day or two after you write the post to give your mind a break from the content and read it with fresh eyes.

7. Use CTAs

While the majority of your blogs are not designed to be hard sells, you should always include a Call to Action (CTA) at the end of every blog post. Perhaps it’s as simple as linking them to related content or asking them to download a guide. The further down the funnel they are, the more aggressive your CTA can be.

8. Meet every step of the customer journey

That brings me to my next point: Having content for every step of the customer journey. Some readers are just discovering your brand, and some have been avid followers and customers for years. Make sure to have different content for these different audiences and the appropriate CTA to keep them engaged.

9. Know your audience

As you’re providing content for every step of the customer journey, it never hurts to double-check that your target audience matches your real audience. Buyer personas are a great way to get a handle on your customers’ needs and what they’re looking for out of your content.

At least once a year you should be reviewing your buyer personas against real, customer-backed demographic data to ensure you’re targeting the right people.

10. Promote

Many content marketers spend more time promoting their pieces than they do creating it and that’s because no piece of content is going to go viral if you don’t share it!

Identify what social networks you should be sharing your blog on, how it can fit in an email campaign, or even reaching out to third-parties to see if they’ll share your post with their followers. Setting aside time to promote your content is a big part of your blogging strategy.

11. Engage

As you promote your content, be sure to engage with people who are reading it, sharing it, and commenting on it. Whether that’s simply replying back to comments on your blog or on your social media networks, to installing retargeting code on your site that triggers an email sharing other related content your customers may find useful.

By showing you’re engaged, your customers are more likely to trust you and have a better relationship with your brand.

12. Repurpose

Creating a lot of fresh, new content can be a challenge so help make your job easier by repurposing your content. Have a blog post that’s done really well? Turn it into an infographic, animated video, interview, or a chapter of an ebook! You’ve already invested time and resources into a great post, so why not change up its format a bit to get more mileage out of it?

13. Test new content types and formats

Don’t use the word failure when it comes to your content marketing, it’s always a learning opportunity. You just happened to learn that that style of content doesn’t work with your audience. While it’s good to know what your audience wants and what they like, you can always test out new content types and formats.

Perhaps your interview-style blogs are really popular, well maybe they’d do really well as a podcast too! You’ll never know if you’re sitting on a gold mine if you don’t test new blog topics and styles.

14. Track results

We can’t test new content types and determine if they’re successful if we’re not tracking the results of current blogging efforts. Like you need to devote time to promoting your content, you also need to schedule time to dive into analytics to measure your content’s performance.

Take a look at how people found your blog, who they are, how much time they’re spending reading your posts, the bounce rate, and conversion rate or page value to determine how successful a post or series of posts are.

Hopefully these blogging best practices help your content marketing and blogging efforts this year! Please share any other best practices you use in the comments section.