Below are a few key points that I picked up from Helen and from the interesting contributions of those attending:
- Helen described the ten ingredients, which she feels make up a good blog. They fit into three groups. Group one is the aim, audience, style and subject. Group two is the technical elements around process, contributors, standards and dealing with the unexpected. Group three is around promotion and creating a conversation with your audience.
- By thinking about and defining the aim and audience, the decisions you make on style/tone and topics should follow fairly logically.
- At all times, it’s important to think about the whole of your intended audience and avoid decisions on tone or topics that might cause people to feel excluded or ignored. That doesn’t mean you should never touch controversial or devisive topics, but you should think how to balance them out either in the same post or in subsequent ones.
- 300 to 500 words seem to work well for a Cityparents blog. People are often reading the blog on their phones while commuting, so short and sweet often works better than a “long read”.
- It’s great to have a group of contributors for your blog. If you are in a particular industry, you might be able to feature people from different parts of the chain. If you’re writing for a farm shop, for example, you might want to feature “a day in the life” of growers, producers, customers as well as people who work in the shop.
- Reserve the right to edit and the right to refuse any contribution you’re not happy with.
- When looking at ways to promote your blog, you should think about “Share” and “Forward” buttons. Another thing you can do is “piggyback” on “awareness” days and campaigns, employing hashtags associated with them. There is an online calendar of these at Awareness Days. Did you know that November 3 is National Sandwich Day, for example?
- Share your posts far and wide on social media. Add a question or a poll to your posts to encourage engagement.
- Images are an important addition to a blog post (especially if you want to grab attention on social media). If you don’t have images of your own, Unsplash is a good source of free images. You can also edit photos for free with PhotoEditor.com.
- A good way to increase the reach of your blogs is to make sure that titles include any key words you think your audience might use when searching for you (or your competitors). Include as many of the key word sin your title and in the URL of the page, too.
- If you are building up a list of email addresses that you are sending your blog to, use a tool like MailChimp that helps you steer your way through the legal requirements of collecting and storing personal data. This kind of tool includes the unsubscribe details in the footer of every email it sends out and asks you to confirm that each person gave you permission before you add their address. Unless you’re sending thousands of emails, MailChimp is free, too.
What blogs do you read? Are there any that you think really show how well blogs can boost a business' presence? Let me know what you think.