Taking Your Blogging to the Next Level

The chances are that you have been writing blogs for quite a while now. You undoubtedly have written on all sorts of exciting topics and you have engaged many of your target audience members. However, if you haven’t asked yourself this already, you need to ask if the level of your blog writing is enough anymore.

Making improvements to what you have already written

No matter what brand or business you own (or work for), your content can’t stagnate, ever! It must constantly be evolving so that your relationships with other people are allowed to evolve as well. In this next phase of blog writing, you need to think carefully about what sort of blog content you want to write. Of course, whatever topics you come up with must be passions of yours. If you are passionate about the topic, other people will sense that about you and they will be excited about what you are sharing.

If you aren’t sure about which topics to choose to write about, pay closer attention to the discussions that you have with your target audience members. They will let you know in their posts exactly what they want to read about. You probably will not have to dig too deeply to find what you are looking for.

The other thing that you should consider carefully is exactly who your target audience is and how you want them to develop in their relationships with you. It is important for you to remember that there is a learning curve with all relationships. Part of any relationship is the educational element. You give to each other and you learn from each other. There are some logical steps that you will want to follow when taking your content to the next level. They may not be steps that you have thought about.

Have a solid editorial strategy 

The editorial strategy should have different elements that you will want to consider. 

• Choose your voice: Hopefully, you have a solid, consistent way of writing in your own voice. However, there are several different approaches that you can possibly take, such as telling your story (one of many), writing your blog in a conversational tone, or giving it a teaching tone.

• Stay away from time-sensitive content, whenever possible: If you want your content to be relevant over time, you will want to keep it evergreen. Time-sensitive content is only relevant for a short time. Even if that particular event comes up annually, you are still limited about how much you can use it. It is a shame to work so hard on writing that blog (or another piece of content) only to have your hands tied by its natural limitation.

• Establish your goal: You need to figure out exactly which goals you want to accomplish with your target audience. Do you want to teach them something, merely have discussions (undoubtedly valuable discussions), just inform them of what you are doing, or more directly let them know that you have the ability to solve their problems.

• Choose an effective format for your blog: Believe it or not, your format is more important than you may think. Your format has a lot to do with how your readers will react to whatever you are posting. If the format is cumbersome and difficult to follow, your readers will not have the patience to stick with it and read all the way to the end.

• Posting frequency: You need to establish a blog posting frequency and stick with it each week. It is important to understand that the frequency will be different for each business/person so you need to choose the frequency that works for your particular business. However, what is most important is being consistent with how many times a week (and on which days, hours, etc.) you post each week. 

• Choose a consistent blog length: Your blogs should consistently be between 500 and 1,000 words in length. If you write blogs that are shorter than 500 words, you will probably not have enough length to say everything that you want to say. On the other hand, if you go much over 1,000 words, you may start to use some words that are not necessary and the reader may lose patience.

• Establish an editorial calendar: You will want to establish an editorial calendar before you do anything because it will keep you organized and timely.

Conclusion

Posting blogs is one of the most essential parts of your online content marketing strategy. However, it is very important for you to not allow your content to stagnate. Because of that, it is essential that you constantly allow your blogs to evolve so that you can bring your content to the next level effectively. In fact, you should constantly be trying to come up with ways to improve your content and make sure that it grows in the most appropriate way possible.

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