Blogging is the new Marketing.
With a substantial shift towards the digital world, most companies have started using blogging and content strategies to increase their worth in the market. From using social media channels to increasing brand recognition, blogging is one of the most effective ways of building a business today. From over 1.7 billion online sites over the internet, over 600 million contain blogs and leverage content on their blogs to increase their marketing and digital presence. According to WordPress, almost 70 million blog posts are written afresh monthly.
Blogging is highly relevant in the world today, especially when it comes to increasing business profitability. To ensure high growth through blogging, marketers need to spend time strategizing. To make life easier, we’ve put together a list of the top blogging trends that your business needs to update to maximize and capitalize on your efforts –
- Optimizing Word Count
One of the conflicting positions that most marketers deal with is they feel users have a very short attention span nowadays. Many people feel that blog content should be shorter instead of long-form because otherwise, it’s as good as wasted content. So how long should a blog be?
According to Orbit Media, in 2016, the average word count on a blog post was 1000 words. In 2020, word counts continued to rise – but that’s okay. Blogging comes down to engagement – even if you have a long-form post, the point is, is it engaging enough? Also, how are you using long-form content to capitalize on promoting your business?
Your blogging strategy should first help you divide your content into long and short form to optimize word count. Once you decide what your average word count should be, keep it consistent through all your posts.
- Adding Value to Readers
Today’s most difficult thing is to grab user attention – a point that can’t be stressed enough. Promoting valuable content also helps customers understand a business and how it can be profitable for them. Giving out valuable information for free helps create a user following, increase website traffic and enable success through the sales funnel.
- Content Optimization
Simply writing content isn’t useful – writing content that can be optimized is where marketing skills step in. To increase site traffic, content needs to be purposeful analytically. Using Google Analytics can help you ascertain the traffic your content is creating. Ways to address content optimization are using proper keywords, ensuring your page ranks on Google, creating content that shows up on Google FAQs, etc.
- Promoting Content
Promoting content is as essential as creating it – to get your content noticed by people and ensure user interaction, you need to blast your content into the world. Using social media to promote content is one of the best and most effective ways of doing this. Many users also use email marketing tools, and using backlinks within your content is another way to ensure promotion. Here’s a tip – for best results, create and promote consistently.
- Time & Effort
Blogging is everywhere now, and ensuring that content is unique and optimized takes time. On average, bloggers spend about 6 hours working on writing and digitally optimizing their content to ensure the best results.
- Use Scannable Content
Reading a blog requires a reader to scroll through content. When you post content, remember that it’s divided into various folds – the part the reader can see on the screen versus the part they cannot. What makes the reader want to scroll down to the bottom of your post and spend more time on your content? It makes it important to ensure your content is scannable. It means making optimum use of headings, bullet points, table of contents etc. – items that help a reader understand what they can expect in the blog. Think of these as spoilers that keep the reader enticed and want to read more.
Ready to Use Some of These Blogging Strategies?
Blogging is an excellent tool to gather outreach and recognition for your brand. Use a few tweaks to your blogging strategy to adopt digital models suited to help your marketing soar in 2021. With the right strategy, this could be your year!
Tags: Blog, Blog Marketing, Blogs, Content Marketing, content marketing tips, Content Optimisation, Digital Marketing, marketing blog, marketing content, Marketing strategy, marketing trends, Social Media Marketing