6 Components to a successful blog

Blogging

A blog is a tool that allows you to easily add fresh content and articles that allow for comment and feedback by others.  Blogs are websites that are designed to engage an audience with fresh content.

Google loves blogs – the content is constantly changing, new content with increasing amount of relevant links in and outbound.

Components of a Blog

1          Header

1. Have your proper branding in place.

2. Have your functionality in place, you can have your menu up under the header including Contact Info.

3. Give access to more information than your readers are looking for.

2          Posts

Blog about the Bigger Idea – the wider subject matter

Use your blog as a tool to connect with your customers and why you’re doing what you’re doing, especially if you need to diffuse a difficult situation.  Helps to leverage trust.

Add social sharing buttons to your posts so your readers can easily share your content with their networks.

“An effective business blog article is defined as one that attracts and converts visitors into leads. Therefore, it should contain informative and business-relevant content.  Explicit and pure business promotion, however, should be avoided in blogging—blog articles might not be widely read when they appear self-serving.” – Hubspot

3          Comments

1. Anything you can do to help generate comments on the blog post is great as it makes the post more interesting.

2. When someone leaves a comment on your post then reply to each comment and refer to the person by their first name.

3. It makes it more conversational and encourages other people to comment – it makes it more personal.

4          Sidebars

Sidebars can allow you to add other ways to interact and to collect information from your readers as well as another way to get information out to your readers.

1. Can include sign ups and social media feeds – ie twitter feed or facebook like box.

2. Meet your bloggers.

3. Video

4. Photos

5. Use it as a cyber icebreaker, you want to make it as personal as possible – to pictures of bloggers and bio’s and using first name when replying to comments etc.

6. Most popular post

7. Recent comments

5      Sharing

Add social share buttons on your blog so that your readers can easily share your content with the click of a button.

6       Lead Capture

You’re creating all this fresh and relevant content, other people are sharing it across their networks, but you don’t know who.  Add the option for interested visitors to share their name and email address with you (give them an incentive) and keep in touch with these visitors through regular email.

Pick bloggers that are happy and passionate and not people that would rather be doing something else.

When you first start out it’s going to take some time to get traction and you won’t see any response to what your writing initially, you need to stick to it.

Who is interested in being customer focused and thrive in connecting and helping your customers?