Finding the time to put a blog post out once or twice a week can be a great way to keep your business profile fresh. A blog gives fans and the broader market an idea of the direction your company is going in. It can be a great sounding board for ideas, with responses, reads and shares all feeding back interesting information about how posts – and more importantly their contents – are received.
One thing that any blog writer will have noticed is that some posts take off, with multiple shares and reads, while others sit ignored. Naturally some posts are more interesting than others, but there is a little more to it than that.
Breaking News
For one thing, the ability to write posts that respond to news as it comes out get a lot better reception than posts that pick up a story even a few days later. A well written blog post, in fact, can become a part of a story. If you have something to say that is relevant and timely, it will get read and shared for those reasons. The ability to react to trends quickly is worth a lot to news providers of all shades.
Know Your Audience
Content matters, of course. A reader will be happier to read a well written, engaging post than a dull one. But if they’re being honest, they would be far more enthusiastic again about a post that links into their interests and echoes their opinions or ideas. Knowing roughly what a blog’s readers are likely to be thinking informs you as the writer about what to say. That’s not to say posts should have no unique points of view – of course they should. But giving a reader a little of their own thoughts back can pay dividends in terms of readership.
Visuals
It is also worth saying a word about the visual side of a blog. The internet used to be text-based. Now it is image-based. In a matter of years, it will probably be built around dynamic visuals and video. In the interim, images are a powerful way to get posts noticed instantly and, while it is easy to forget them, they are one of the surest ways to get clicks.
All this being said, there really is no substitute for great content. Carrying a good old fashioned notebook around and jotting down interesting ideas, if such a thing can be countenanced, still has a lot to be said for it – even as technology marches on. There really is no substitute for a good idea.
