Ready, Set, Blog!

Well, as silly as it may sound, this blog is all about blogging. Yes, we are blogging with tips on how to make the most out of your blog!

If you read our post last week, you will know that it is very important to make sure that what you are putting in your blog posts correspond to your overall search strategies. We didn’t go into great detail on this topic but we are going to dive into it now.  Let’s begin with a discussion about tags.

When you write your blog it is a very good idea to select tags. Tags are words or short phrases that you would like associated with your blog post. (So, if you are blogging about gluten-free cooking, you want to make sure that you have tags such as “cooking”, “gluten-free”, “diet”, etc.) If you aren’t sure what tags to select, it can help to Google your topic and see what comes up. You may find other blog posts about your topic that will help guide your tag selections.  (Just in case you are wondering why you should take the time to select tags, by doing so, you are helping others find your blog by just doing a search.)

What might help you even further in determining what tags to use is to step back and think about what you would type into Google to find your own blog. At the end of the day it is all about consistency. Really step back and look at what you are writing about, what words you are using and how people would logically find you by doing a search.

We also wanted to make sure that we included some basics about blogging so here are some best practices. Make sure that your blog posts aren’t too long – most people would prefer to read your insights in multiple, smaller doses than try to read a long blog post. Our recommendation is that you shoot for 250-500 words for each blog post. (If you write your posts as a Microsoft Word document before you cut and paste, think about writing less than one full page.)

Another helpful hint involves frequency. We recommend that you blog often. What we do for our blog and for our client’s blogs is try to post something weekly. Every Wednesday is blogging day for us at Focus Marketing + PR – we set aside time each Wednesday to write our blogs! Pick your day to write your blog.

And finally, you need to think about promoting your blog. If you send out a newsletter, make sure you mention your blog (and include a link). If you use social media, that is another opportunity to promote your posts as well. Blogging is a great way to showcase your unique expertise and create some buzz for your company. Don’t forget to do what you can to get noticed.

Ready, set, blog!

Coming up next week we are going to be talking about Instagram. Don’t miss it!