Beautiful blogging: 5 ways to build a more engaging blog

Use creative content to reach your audience

With search engines placing more emphasis on valuable content, a once-static website can now become a more dynamic calling card for any company. An optimal way to keep your website fresh is to create and maintain a well-crafted blog to attract new visitors and further build relationships with those who have visited previously. With greater focus on inbound marketing, companies are ditching aggressive sales and marketing approaches of yesteryear and replacing them with conscientious, thoughtful and strategic engagement to assert differentiation.

Blogs are evolving to incorporate useful and creative content in the form of videos and hyper-localized content. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you consider your blogging efforts.

Attract with catchy headlines.

Search engine optimizers suggest you start with a useful and engaging headline. Build content with information consumers will read and then link or share, and attach a creative, eye-catching, easy-to-read headline. Think like a copy editor who has mere milliseconds to pull in a reader. “3 ways to save on taxes” is superior to “A guide to saving money on your taxes this year.” The first offers bulleted brevity, while the other seems lengthy, requiring additional time.

Use formatting to keep readers engaged.

When creating blog content, keep your paragraphs short. Add relevant images, infographics, graphs, charts or video to break up paragraphs. Use bold, italics and subheads for lengthier pieces. And, don’t forget to build in internal links to pertinent pages from your website (buy-now button, other blog posts, etc.) to make navigation around your website easier. Once you polish your content, confirm that your blog title and URL contain selected keywords. Your metadescription, often the subhead of your post, should also be concise and include keywords.

Give away something for free.

Free? Yes, free. You should consider your blog a resource for your clients. Share tips, trade secrets, opinions, coupons, news, promotions, creative videos and links to companies that share your mission. Should you have a short guide, white paper or brief e-book that could support your clients, deliver it as a free download with email sign-up. Your blog should become an active extension of your company and an entryway to lead generation (capturing emails), while allowing you to measure traffic and areas of interest based upon how often people view and share your content.

Consider the quality of your content.

We’ve seen firsthand in the last year how important content creation across all communications is. There’s a demand for creative and useful content as well as content that builds relationships (hyperlocal). Your company exists because you have something people want. Give them snippets to prove benefit through photographs, metrics, customer stories and testimonials. All of these work well within the blog framework.

Maintain a consistent posting schedule.

Once you activate your blog, the only way to truly gain engagement and traction is to post consistently. Keep it fresh with new content regularly, even if you only have time to post once a month. A consistent schedule is better than no schedule. Tie your blog into your social media channels too, to help build subscribers.

Companies use blogs today to further build trust and brand awareness and to establish closer relationships with target demographics. Ancillary benefits include increased SEO and rankings, which are certainly a plus. To learn more about inbound marketing tactics to support your company, download Axia Public Relations’ complimentary Inbound Marketing Guide today.

Wendy Bulawa Agudelo has nearly 20 years of experience in technology, business, consumer and nonprofit public relations. She serves on the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress PR Task Force and is a culinary enthusiast and champion for the special needs community. Wendy has worked for Axia Public Relations since September 2014. Learn more about Wendy Bulawa Agudelo. Connect with Axia on Twitter @axiapr or tell us what you think in the comments below.