How Do You Turn a Company Blog into a Valuable Asset?

Let’s look at a few numbers and percentages to show why this matters:

• small businesses with a blog see their sales leads grow by 126% compared to those without (source: Hubspot);
• 61% of users say they are more inclined to buy from companies that publish content frequently (source: Dragon Search Marketing);
• 409 million people view 22.2 billion blog posts every month (source: Wordpress).

And that’s without even touching on the clear SEO benefits, with 97% more inbound links for company websites that have a blog. In short, a blog boosts your brand image, brings in new leads and customers, and increases your company’s visibility without the direct costs of advertising. A miracle? Not quite. Many of you probably already have a company blog, yet struggle to see real benefits. That’s normal: what’s likely missing is the right content and the right publishing frequency. That’s why today we’ll look at a few tricks to get inspired and build a solid, effective editorial plan by answering some frequently asked questions.

The right answer would be “as many as possible, practically every day,” since companies publishing more than twenty posts a month get five times more inbound traffic than the rest, but without a dedicated editorial team that pace is nearly impossible to sustain without sacrificing quality. A good average would be one article a week, every week. If several people in your company have something interesting to say, it may be smart to involve them in content production. Not only will the blog gain more voices and perspectives, but the workload will be shared fairly.

This question scares many people, because there’s always the fear of taking the wrong approach or writing something nobody cares about. The risk is real only if we don’t think about who we’re talking to and what we’re offering in exchange for their attention. The idea is always to develop your ideas around a central topic, with the aim of helping a specific person solve a specific problem. An approach that is often successful and relatively simple is to offer genuine resources to potential customers who, by reading the blog, can find solutions to their problems or ideas to improve their lives, or their work if you’re talking to other businesses. Alternatively, there’s a second approach that can coexist with the first: positioning yourself as an opinion leader by offering insights and fresh trends to peers and other professionals in your industry.

Posts of this kind aim to attract new customers by giving them free, timely and up-to-date information and resources that help them solve problems or improve some aspect of their lives. Typical examples are how-to articles (e.g. “How to insulate your home on a budget”), ebooks (e.g. “Your keto diet”), infographics (e.g. “How car use in cities has changed”) and all kinds of top 10s (e.g. “10 ways to ruin your New Year’s Eve dinner”). This is perhaps the most targeted way to bring new leads into the conversion funnel, because these posts intercept a fairly common search intent. If your posts show up in a Google search and users find them useful, they’ll probably come back to the blog for new articles in the following weeks. Eventually they may decide it’s easier to use your products and services than to learn everything themselves, and the authority you’ve shown in your content would put you in a strong position even in direct negotiations, because the prospect already associates positive qualities with your brand. That’s the foundation of inbound marketing, in a nutshell.

You can talk to customers, of course, but there’s another option some companies can use when they want to explore a topic in more depth, moving away from a more “generalist” approach. “Opinion leader” posts aim to inspire and, why not, educate professionals in your field, keeping them up to date on techniques and methods, offering food for thought and new trends to watch. Writing for people who will NEVER be potential customers may seem counterintuitive, but those with above-average expertise can position themselves as leaders in their industry. If you manage to engage other professionals, interesting opportunities will follow: interviews, blog posts about your company, mentions in industry lists and, why not, conference talks as a guest speaker rather than a sponsor. All of this brings traffic, visibility and, above all, conversion opportunities. The catch is that becoming an opinion leader is no small feat; if you spend time on LinkedIn and on certain Medium topics, you’ll have noticed how desperately many professionals try to position themselves in this category, sometimes with pathetic results. It takes time, a lot of time, and above all showing genuine passion for what you do. Oh, and an obvious note, but better not to take it for granted: to be an “opinion leader,” the thoughts, techniques and tutorials you share must be original. Copying an English-language guide and changing a couple of words is fine for a throwaway article, but it certainly won’t do much as a long-term strategy.

This is the classic writing problem: you may have an interesting idea in mind, but can’t turn it into a clear, readable and compelling format. This step is probably the hardest: coming up with a first topic. Sometimes, to find something to talk about, all you need to do is think about your customers. After all, SEO teaches us that the best way to create content that generates organic traffic is to intercept the search intent of our potential customers; answering the questions of people who already buy from you, who likely have more than one thing in common with your prospects, is an excellent recipe for success. So let’s start by asking what your customers want: what kind of questions do they ask you, and how could you answer them in a blog post? Once you start paying attention, you’ll notice that customer feedback alone is enough material for months of blog posts. Also try to write down your daily activities and make a note whenever you learn something new; and remember that what seems trivial to you, because it has become routine, could change someone else’s life.

Barring bold experiments that I don’t think should concern us too much, the structure of a blog post is roughly the same regardless of the type of topic or theme. Put simply, it’s made up of:

• Title
• Opening paragraph
• Body
• Conclusion 
• Call To Action

Yes, nothing you didn’t already know, except perhaps the opening paragraph as a separate element. Let’s look at each one in detail.

Paradoxically, the title is the most important part of the article, at least from a marketing standpoint, because it decides whether or not we get clicked. A good title must spark interest and draw in the potential reader while staying descriptive and true to the actual content (no clickbait, no promises you can’t keep). Some tricks for writing a catchy title:

1. Use numbers to give an idea of the article’s key points (“4 tricks we learned from the luxury market this year”);
2. Use adjectives that trigger an emotional response (e.g. perfect, fun, free, essential, etc.);
3. Use What, How, Why and When (“Why do our eyes water when we cut an onion?” or “How to move house without stress”)
4. Promise something bold and tantalizing that challenges the reader to dig deeper.

You can mix them, of course, for example: “How to sell your house in 24 hours without even taking off your pajamas.” We could talk about titles for hours, and it’s honestly one of the hardest things to decide. Before you hit “publish,” have someone read just the title and ask whether they’d open an article with that name; if not, start over!

The average attention span of a person browsing the web is shorter than a goldfish’s. Literally: a user typically gets distracted after just eight seconds. That’s why the opening paragraph must make a great first impression and keep attention high. If we get lost in endless anecdotes or frivolous introductions, we won’t capture the reader’s attention, and they’ll leave. The opening paragraph also serves to explain the title better and briefly outline our thesis. Taking the example above, you can state right away how easy it is to sell a house in a day if you follow X simple tips. Good ways to keep attention high are quotes (whether scholarly ones or from people close to the reader in role or industry), questions (“Is selling your house a Way of the Cross with too many stations for you too?”) or a strong statement you’re sure you can back up with facts (“After reading this, the very idea of hiring a real estate agency will make you die laughing”).

In the end, it’s the real reason we’re writing. It’s the heart of the post, where we lay out the thesis announced in the title and the first paragraph. Every blog post is its own story, but it’s still important to present your arguments in a logical, consistent order; not everything has to fit into a bulleted structure or a six/seven/twelve-step process, but you can’t just write off the cuff in a muddled way. One way to make sure you stay on topic is to create a bullet-point outline, so you know from the start how to structure your argument. From there, all that’s left is to actually write the text, then use the outline to divide the post into main sections with plenty of subheadings.

Quite simply, it’s how we sum up the value offered in the article, recapping its key points in a few words and drawing conclusions from the whole body.

If readers have made it to the end, they’re probably already fairly engaged, so it can be a good idea to send them off with a call to action, that is, a nice invitation to act. It doesn’t have to be commercial; it can be a link to another guide, to your Instagram account or to a case study. What matters, if you’ll forgive the slightly odd term in this context, is to train users to take an action before closing the page.

Once you’ve figured out what to write and how, all that’s left is to get down to work and produce lots and lots of content to share. It takes months to see the first results, and your first attempts may not be very rewarding. But if you put user needs first and keep a steady publishing schedule, the results can only be positive!