What’s that cliché about giving advice? Oh, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Well, we’ve decided to take our own advice and start a blog. As a whole, agencies tend to focus on client work instead of themselves. But that’s changing. We’ve vowed to make more “us” time.

Now, you may be thinking, “Woo! Another post about why you should blog,” but stay with us. After all, we’re the experts.

Reasons to blog:

• It develops a deeper relationship with audience.
  • Blogging is like dating. You have to get to know your audience in order to build a better relationship. Targeting their interests and the topics they want to know more about builds trust.
• It’s a free way to increase visibility and drive traffic to your website.
  • Writing regular fresh content in your area of expertise gives search engines plenty to crawl and tells them you’re the authority on the subject. Plus, posts are great places to develop keyword-rich links to your site.
• It establishes thought leadership with original content.
  • A blog gives you a medium to write about timely and relevant industry news. Social helps with thought leadership, of course, but blogging allows a place for you to elaborate on topics.
• It generates new business leads.
  • An increase in website traffic creates opportunity for new business leads. More than likely, a potential client researches a partner before choosing them. With a well-established blog, they can get a better sense of your brand personality and where your expertise lies, and thereby determine whether you are a good fit for them.
• It highlights the brand’s story.
  • Social is great for brands, but it can be limiting. You have to take platform algorithms into consideration and cough up some money if you want followers to see your posts. Through blogs, you can have a two-way conversation with consumers, along with better control of online visibility.

Now for some best practices:

• Discuss content strategy and a planning calendar.
  • In order to run a blog properly, you need a game plan.
• Set short- and long-term goals.
  • Establishing goals will help to fuel your planning calendar. A clear map of where you want your blog to go will help with blog topics and getting your company involved.
• Post consistently.
  • What’s worse than not having a blog? Having an inconsistent one. When you’re setting a content strategy, keep in mind that you will want to post consistently for your audience. Typically, when starting a company blog, you’ll want to post at least two to four times a month. Then as you get a rhythm, aim to post even more per month.
• Post 400–1,000 words, on average.
  • Longer posts help with SEO ranks, but you want to make sure you are writing valuable information and not just pushing out mediocre content. Research has found that posts with fewer than 300 words are not valuable for SEO. If you can’t write a post longer than that, hold off and put together more thought on the topic.
• Use visual content (videos, graphics, photos, etc.).
  • It’s not news that the internet is jam-packed with blogs. But, companies aren’t just in competition with other companies. Anyone with a phone, computer or tablet can be a content creator and post to a blog. So how do you stand out? Visuals.
• Analyze and optimize.
  • After you have a few blog posts, it’s best to analyze which ones are performing well and optimize your content to mirror that. Looking at what days and times people are on certain blogs will help refine scheduling as well as what kind of content resonates best with your readers. These small pieces of data will help you put out the best content for your audience.

Maintaining a blog takes time and effort. But we have a lot to say and will focus on industry insight, best practices, highlighting our client and employee work and also give you a glimpse of what we’re all about. To stay in the loop, subscribe by using the newsletter form below.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to get to know us a little better.