An effective blog is one that grabs peoples attention and gets them wanting to read more. If you want to get more readers, your blog must grab their attention when they arrive, it must be easy for them to get what they want, and it must have a consistent and professional look.
I believe the key is to keep it simple and in essence, it must:
- Use pictures and other visual aids that make your posts easy to read;
- Be consistent and representative of your brand;
- Contain useful information which is keyword rich so that it is easy to find on search engines;
- Not contain anything that isn’t helping you promote your business;
- Has a clear call to action so that readers do what you want them to do once they have read it.
You need to be continually and consistently producing great material in your blog posts to stay high on the search engine rankings and drive people to your blog. So what are the key elements for an effective blog?
Here are the 7 elements that I believe will help you generate more visibility.
- Make sure that your blog title contains no more than 60-80 characters and is full of keywords that the search engines can pick up on.
- Your title must be interesting in order to encourage people to want to read it and then “Like” or re-tweet it which will give you even more exposure.
- Write about the things that your audience i.e. clients and prospective clients, want to read about and in particular try to address the problems that your clients face.
- Blog regularly. Don’t use the excuse that “I don’t have time to blog”. Blogging is marketing, and every business needs to make time to market their services. Make time!
- Guest blogging is a great way to reach new audiences so if you have the opportunity to blog at someone else’s blog, grab it! Alternatively, you can ask other bloggers to contribute to your blog, and ask them to promote the post to their readers, who will then check out your blog. Either way, this form of cross-promotion is a great way to help you reach an audience who may otherwise have never heard of you.
- Market your blog. While a blog is in itself a great marketing tool, you still need to market it too by tweeting and promoting your blog posts through Facebook, LinkedIn and other forms of social media.
- Read other influential blogs on a regular basis and then contribute to the discussion as appropriate. When you add your comment you can include the URL to your blog.
The next step, after getting all this extra traffic to your site is to convert those visitors into prospects and you can do this by offering, for example, a free download from your blog which requires an email registration so you can collect leads and start filling your marketing funnel.
If you have any tips for creating an effective blog, please be sure to share them as a comment below and, if you are new to blogging and would like some more information please drop me an email, anne@power-to-change.eu
