Blogging Tips on Capturing and Retaining the Right Audience
Blogging can be fun. But, like any part of your content marketing strategy it requires careful planning. With the right article titles and thought-leading content you can boost brand awareness, build trust, and use your content to populate social channels. You can also capture the right audience and keep them, so here’s how to do this in five useful steps.
-
Know Your Audience
When it comes to blogging tips, knowing your audience is an absolute must. And don’t just presume you know the people who want your products or services, as your assumed audience might be very different from your actual audience. Use analytics to know who is visiting your site and what search terms they’ve used to reach you, as this will help to fuel your overall content strategy. If you notice that specific questions or search terms are used over and over again, you can create blogs that answer such queries.
-
Be Useful and Informative
It might sound simple, but a good blog should be worth reading. What this means is that your readers should leave feeling more knowledgeable than they were before. So be sure to load your articles with stats, include thought-leading opinions and never regurgitate anyone else’s work. Think about how you can add value to a reader’s life, how you can solve problems and what you can do to make them come back for more.
Focussing on specific industry events is one idea. For example if you’re an accountancy firm, you could focus on preparing for the upcoming tax season.
-
Research Keywords
Keyword research is a must. But it’s important to look at keywords that drive traffic to sites similar to yours. If they don’t, you might be barking up the wrong keyword tree. Look closely at the intent of the keywords used. What does the searcher want to achieve by using a particular keyword and can you make their user experience easier by tailoring your blogging strategy around this search intent?
Once you understand your keyword journey and the purpose of specific keywords, you can then start to place them in all the right places – such as in blog titles, sub-headers and URLs.
-
Use Pillar and Topic Clusters
One keyword can result in many blog ideas. For example, if you zoom in on one keyword, this is your pillar. You can then think of a cluster of long-tail keywords which will become the titles of other articles. If you’re in accounting, for example, you might focus on ‘importance of accounting’ as your pillar article. But your cluster could also include titles such as, ‘how to prepare for the tax year,’ ‘how to get your accounts in order,’ ‘streamlining your small business accounts’ and so on. All clusters can link back to your pillar.
-
Make the Most of Analytics
Don’t just write and hope for the best. Top bloggers listen and respond to feedback. This means putting an article out there and then analysing its performance. If it’s getting hits, great. If it’s not, you might have to rethink your strategy.
If you’re looking for a marketing agency Kent, contact Whitefish Marketing today for all of your content needs.
