Blogging Best Practices 2015
Blogging Best Practices Brave New Media
Blogging Best Practices 2015 Overview
The world of blogging is much like anything, one gets out of it what is put in. This document was put together in order to provide basic concepts, guardrails, tips, and suggestions to optimize blogging and blogging practices to current industry standards. This guide contains general guidelines with which to steer the modern blogger toward success as measureable by audience size and engagement. This guide contains an overview of the top insights into content best practices, engagement, SEO, & measureable benchmarks to aim for.
---Content Best Practices
• Use images to attract traffic. Not only do they make your blog more interesting to read, but visual content is much more likely to get shared than non-visual content. Create original images. Make images more effective with text overlay. Use images to attract traffic, make them informative and “share”able.
• Pay attention to the content’s design. Most people will not read every word of a blog. Make the eye/interest-catching the headline, a byline to reel them in, and pack your first two paragraphs with the most interesting or relevant material.
• Share others’ content. For this, follow the 80-20 rule. 80% of your blog should be fun, engaging, and influenced by content curated from others, whereas 20% of your blog should contain information pertaining to your product. However, it is essential that you never plagiarize, but make sure to give credit and acquire permission to share (many times this is done via links). This is great outreach!
• Make it interesting, people want to read something with personality. It is crucial to develop a blog’s overall tone and have it relatable and real, but unique to the brand or individual.
• Know your target audience. The people you’re trying to reach, what do
they do, where are they in life, what questions are they asking and what are their general interests? What problems are they having that you can help with? It is important to harness a grasp of your audience before you begin writing so that you can cater the storytelling to the individuals who are most likely to benefit by or interact with it.
Blogging Best Practices 2015 • Read things that have nothing to do with your industry. Venture outside
of your industry publications. Find a host of amazing content sources -- a great podcast, a great magazine, a great YouTube channel, a great bunch of websites -- and consume that content just because it's high-quality, innovative, and interesting. It'll help you improve skills like storytelling and story structuring, and give you ideas for new content formats to experiment with.
• Write with empathy.
---Engagement
• Inform contacts and connections of blogging efforts, ask them if they’re
willing to share your content.
• Let people know when you've used their content - either by email or Twitter. This helps tremendously because for one, it gives them a heads up that you used their content, and two, they are more likely to share it once they see it.
• Use social media to network and engage, not SPAM. New blogs should
be shared with the driving force being the conversations they could spark. It is important to write from this perspective, but also share via social channels with this perspective. What do you want people saying or asking about this content?
• Target your distribution. Share the pieces with top influencers who have
already shared similar content. Send your content to specific targets.
• Tag/mention relevant people in social posts when sharing content.
• Make blog posts easily shareable on social media sites with the
appropriate icons.
---SEO
• Make it searchable: do proper keyword research.
• SEO: The post should focus on one or two keywords or phrases for
searchability.
• Keywords also appear in the blog post title.
• The meta description includes keywords.
Blogging Best Practices 2015
• Always remember that you are building your content and site for the user,
not the search engine. When creating content, keep the 80/20 rule in mind at all times – 80% of your content should be helpful and educative, while the other 20% can be related to product and company promotion.
---Benchmarks
• Blog posts are ideally under 350 words.
• Bullet points should be utilized to break up long sections.
• There must be at least one image, descriptive picture, or eye-catching
graphic.
• Include a call to action at the end of posts.
• 87% of the blog posts are published during the workweek, with Tuesday
and Wednesday the most popular days for posting. However, Saturdays were particularly ripe for blog post sharing: Only 6.3% of posts were published on Saturdays, but they received 18% of total social shares.
• Blog titles should aim to be between 40-60 characters in length. After 60
characters there is a sharp decline in engagement.
• Blog titles ending in a question mark get nearly twice as many shares as those that do not. Exclamation points do not generate additional
engagement.
• Frequency: “post as often as you want to be found” for some, this is once a day. For others, this is once a week. Baseline should be once a week for regular blog following.
Blogging Best Practices 2015 ---References http://blog.surveyanalytics.com/2014/05/top-5-infographics-of-week-blogging.html http://www.referralcandy.com/ http://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/ http://www.thewholebraingroup.com/ http://midwestmarketingllc.com/ http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2014/25006/blog-best-practices-and-benchmarks http://www.poweredbysearch.com/seo-starter-guide-10-blogging-best-practices/ http://globalngo.org/resources/webinars/50-blogging-best-practices-ngos/ http://blog.marketingv2.com/bid/340526/5-Business-Blogging-Best-Practices http://www.socialquickstarter.com/content/55-blogging_best_practices http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blogging-best-practices-list http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-social-media/blogging http://www.zigftp.com/Reports/Zig%20Blogger%20Research%20Report%20Part %201%20-%20Revenue.pdf http://technorati.com/report/2013-dir/creating-influence/ http://blogging.org/blog/blogging-stats-2012-infographic/ http://www.blogengage.com/blogger/blogosphere-in-2013-if-you-blog-it-they-will-come/ http://technorati.com/report/2013-dir/influencers-revenue/ http://www.social4retail.com/the-blog-economy-blogging-stats-infographic-2014.html
