Building a beautiful website is only the beginning. You still need to attract people to the site and give them a great experience that is both dynamic and useful. Otherwise, your site will languish, unused and unvisited. And, without visitors, your site will never reach its potential as a place to create new fans of your organization and to strengthen your ties with your customers and potential customers.
At Fryed Egg, we work with our clients to operate websites that are lively and informative. A crucial ingredient for a dynamic website is the frequent addition of new content, often in the form of blog posts. Here are some keys to creating and running a blog that will keep visitors coming back.
Consider your audience
The primary goal of your website should be to create a great experience for the people that use it, and your blog content should reflect that overarching goal. Blog posts are an opportunity for you to educate your audience about key issues related to the work that you do. Avoid the hard sell. Your new content should be about creating unique value for visitors to your site rather than simply selling to them. Identify your audience, consider what type of content would benefit them, and tailor each post to fit their needs.
A mix of trending and evergreen
For many organizations, the best approach is to produce a mix of posts that are both timely and timeless. That means creating some posts that tackle ongoing trends and recent events while also publishing posts that target more “evergreen” topics. When your blog provides insight into trend topics, you ensure its relevance in the moment and highlight that you are on top of the latest developments in your field. Evergreen content, meanwhile, not only promotes your expertise, but it also strengthens the longevity of your blog. With the right SEO, an evergreen post can attract views via search engine results long after it has gone live.
Make it visually appealing and well-organized
Invest time and resources in the visual presentation of your posts. Blocks of text on their own will quickly send people away. Use graphics and photos to illustrate your written posts, bringing attention to them and giving readers a visual cue to the topic and angle of each post. It also should be easy for visitors to understand where to find your fresh content, search for past posts, and navigate throughout your blog or news page. Use links within a post to helpful and relevant pages within your site, as well as outside of your site when appropriate. Blog posts work best when they are succinct and quickly readable, but you can use a post to link to longer, more in-depth resources that you have on your site, such as case studies or e-books. A blog post is also an excellent forum for promoting new videos.
Build your audience with outreach
If you want to draw people to your great content, you will have to do more than simply post it and wait for droves of people to find their way to it. You have to let them know it’s there. Every time you post new content to your site, you should promote it. Social media is a natural and effective way to do that. So is an email to a carefully curated list of contacts alerting them to a new post. Some posts also may be strong candidates for ad campaigns, such as through Google search ads, which can boost engagement and build momentum for your content. No matter your promotional tools, using SEO best practices also will help attract search-related traffic to your site. The more recurring site visitors you have, the more you can build momentum and grow your audience base.
Fryed Egg helps our clients build and manage dynamic websites that provide invaluable, fresh content for their audiences, and we can help you with yours. If you want to see if Fryed Egg is the right agency for your needs, contact us at (813) 478-0494 or [email protected] or visit www.FryedEgg.com.