No matter what your business, a blog can be an effective marketing tool for your brand identity. A blog gives you a platform to present content that shows your grasp of issues in your industry. It’s important to have a blog that people can find, easily searchable on Google, and connected to social networks like Facebook and your industry’s social media networks.
You also want to have a blog that readers will come back to, over and over, with fresh posts your readers will link to or forward. An interested reader will, essentially, do a lot of marketing work for you, by sharing interesting links on Facebook, or re-Tweeting them on Twitter.
To write a fresh, timely article, it’s important to know what people are talking about on the Internet. You want your content to reflect keywords that people are searching for on Google, or catching in their news feeds. You might have heard of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Basically, it boils down to knowing how Google is coming up with content to respond to what people search for, and then optimizing, or tailoring your blog content to those strong, timely keywords, so that your blog comes up in the top results for the search topic. Understanding Google’s tools and logic gets easier with Google Webmaster, and will help you present your blog and its content in a way Google can find easily.
Twitter is another good source of keywords. The trending topics on the right hand side of your Twitter page tell you what people are talking about right now.
Let those timely keywords spark blog posts that relate to your topic. Recent events, recent debates? Make sure your blog reflects what’s going on, in an original and timely way.
Use the same keyword and topic based approach to your own industry news. Set up a news feed on a news feed reader like Google Reader, to keep track of other blogs talking about your industry and topics that industry.
Be an active part of your industry’s community web presence, participating in discussions with your peers on LinkedIn and professional associations’ message boards. On LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to participate in their Answers discussion, showing your knowledge of your subject, and reading what others in your network and your industry are asking or discussing.
Let these keywords give you ideas for blog posts showing your smart analysis of the topics at hand.
Because posting several times a week is your goal, setting themes or topics for different days can be helpful. Anything from Mailbag Mondays to Follow Fridays can give you ways to post original content.
If you’re really stuck for ideas to write about, even after scouring the news feeds, Twitter Trending topics and your professional social network, there’s still a way to post content. Link roundups of other blogs you’ve read and enjoyed, or industry news items, can be a good way to show your awareness of the industry, as well as get something posted, to keep your blog’s traffic relevant and lively.
With these tools to inspire blog posts, you will always have something new and fresh to write.
{ 0 comments }
There are many ways to garner a high readership for a 
