What Should I Blog About?

As the digital world continues to grow, blogging can be a necessary evil when it comes to marketing. Blogging is important for many reasons including:

• SEO: This buzzword (buzz-acronym) literally means Search Engine Optimization. Blogging is huge when it comes to having great SEO. This is due largely in part to the fact that Google favors websites that appear current. If your website hasn’t been updated since November 2004, Google is not going to be your biggest fan (or source of traffic).
• Subject Matter Expertise: It’s important that your followers or clients know that you know your stuff. Blogging is a great way to show just how much you know.
• Driving Website Traffic: As a business, we are constantly looking for ways to increase traffic to our website and get people to stay on our site longer. Spending money on ads is one way to get people to your site but blogging on relevant topics can get people in as well as get them to stay.

So we know engaging with customers and peers is important, but we often find ourselves wondering what to say. Often, what makes any creative project difficult is not having clear boundaries.

As you find yourself in need of updated web copy, ask yourself the following questions to help create your own boundaries and guide your writing:

Who is your audience?

Defining your target audience can be a great way to determine what you should write about. Are you targeting other professionals in your field, donors, kids, product users? Define what that group looks like and you’ll be one step closer to a great blog topic.

What is your goal?

So you’ve decided you are going to write to your product users. As you communicate with those users, what goals do you have? Are you hoping to educate those users on a particular product? Maybe you want to teach them about a new way to use your product. Are you hoping they will take action as a results of reading your blog and what action do you want them to take? Many great blogs can start by defining your end goals.

What topic relates to both your audience and goals?

As you’ve walked through questions 1 and 2 you have probably considered a few audiences you could address and a few things you could talk about. It is important to look at where your audience and goals intersect. For example, you may not want to talk to a teenager about donating money for your event but you may want to invite them to that event. On the other hand, if the event is a rock concert your donors may not be as interested. As you blog, consider where these question cross paths and how you can write content targeted for both your goals and your audience.

What is your content strategy?

In keeping a consistent writing schedule, it’s important to have a content strategy in place. Starting with 101 type blogs and doing follow up blogs going deeper into subject matter can be a great way to build your blog archives. These types of blogs can keep traffic coming to your site consistently and keep people on your website longer, as they see more content that relates to their interests and needs.