As the Marketing Director for CloudShare, one area of our website that gets a lot of attention is our blog. We have consistently grown the number of visitors to our blog by 12% every week in the last year. That’s significant and largely due to our regular writers, MVPs, and guests (thanks guys and gals)!
Each week I talk to a few different MVPs, partners, or others on the CloudShare team about blogging for us and I get asked the same questions - How much should I write? Do I need to include pictures? How do I know people will want to read what I’m writing about? Unanimously everyone says “I’d love to blog, I just don’t have the time to sit down and write”. Isn’t that the truth!
Last week Lydia Bronze shared her technical blog writing tips. This week I’m following that up with marketing best practices to go with that. After all, who doesn’t have their own blog, or write for their company’s blog today?
Here’s my list of blogging best practices I’ve learned over the years:
- Know your audience – write about things they care about or will help them get their work done (don’t just blog about your latest press release or the product you sell).
- Keep it simple – 250 words or less is enough. You can write more if you have more to say, but less is enough too. If people want to know more they’ll let you know and then you have an idea for starting your next blog post.
- Use social media – make it easy for readers to share your article on Twitter and Facebook. And use your Facebook and Twitter accounts to let people know you have a new blog post.
- Refer to other news articles, slideshares, blogs, videos – include hyperlinked text linking to 2-4 other pages on your website or third-party pages with info related to your post.
- Mention trends or interesting comments made by thought leaders in the space – industry analysts, journalists, etc.
- Include an image – but only if it pertains to what you wrote about. This keeps it interesting for readers.
- Ask a question at the end of your post to encourage comments and engagement.
That’s all you need to get started! It doesn’t really take much to build a killer blog, and you’ll be surprised how a couple paragraphs where you write as if you’re having a conversation with your readers can have an impact.
If you blog, what have you found works best?
Would you like to blog for the CloudShare Community? If so I’d love to hear from you. Email me at sonya@cloudshare.com.