New Year’s Resolutions for Successful Blogging

The new year is a great chance to assess how you could up your blogging game. Your brand’s blog is a potentially very powerful way to attract your audience, engage with them and demonstrate your expertise, helpfulness and responsiveness. It doesn’t close sales, but it does power the engine of your inbound marketing.

How can you make your blog more compelling in 2018? Here’s a list of resolutions for better blogging.

• Cut the fluff. Your blog is not the place for write-ups about your products. Of course, you can mention them in context, but the focus of your blog should be much broader than the specific items or skills you sell. Your readers are looking for answers; they want to learn. So think carefully about what they want, what problems they need to solve and what inspires them.
• Focus on the visuals. Your words can be incredible. You can write lyrical prose that will practically hypnotize your audience. But they won’t even read it if your blog doesn’t appeal to their eye first. Use compelling, relevant images that include people when possible. Avoid light types and fussy fonts. Remember, they are surfing the internet. Your blog has to be the one that stops them and makes them linger for a better look. That does not mean it should resemble the Las Vegas strip! (Unless that’s what floats their boats.) But it means the strong, clean design is critical and easy-to-read fonts and layout are essential.
• Be predictable. Put a blogging schedule in writing. Get it in your calendar, and make sure you stick to it. People will come to expect your blog on a certain day. Do not disappoint them! When you are planning ahead like this, you can more easily match topics to events, current and historical, to add interest to your posts. Holidays, sporting events and historic anniversaries can inspire some great content.
• Use video. Video is one of the biggest, most stable trends in digital marketing. Ignore it at your peril. You can use video for how-to demonstrations, tours of your facilities, or interviews with experts in your field.
• Proofread relentlessly. Errors in your blog reflect poorly on you. If you have decided to write your blog yourself instead of hiring a professional writer, you might consider hiring a proofreader.
• Use the comments as a way to engage with your readers. Never let a comment go without a response. Replying gracefully to negative comments is an important way to show readers you are a professional, but you are free to delete abusive, trolling comments, especially if they are targeting other readers. (You might never get such comments, but it is best to be prepared for them just in case.)
• Use tags to organise content so your visitors can find more of what they like. The goal of your blog is to engage, draw your audience in and tell them more. Using comprehensive tags for each post, and showing a word cloud or other visual that allows people to find all posts on a topic makes it easy for people to explore your blog.

Your blog should be fueled by passion. And it should also be well planned and strategic. Finding the right balance and following these tips can help boost your readership and draw more people into your sales funnel.