Inside the Profession

Friday Five: Capturing the Blogosphere

Do you or your company have a presence in the blogosphere? If you’re not, you’re potentially missing out on a tool that can offer significant benefits to your online strategy. Blogs serve as a versatile platform to share information and promote your brand. With the ability to feature long posts, photos and more, blogs allow users to share information in a variety of ways, while simultaneously offering the opportunity to improve SEO. Having a successful, functioning blog can be very beneficial to your brand, and this week’s post offers tips and techniques that aim to help you master the art of blogging and ultimately reap the benefits.

In this week’s PRSA “Friday Five”– an analysis of the week’s biggest public relations and business news and commentary – we look at the latest news about succeeding in the blogosphere. Tips for new bloggers, how to make your blog stand out among the millions, rules to follow when writing long blogs and how to use your blog to improve SEO are all covered in this week’s post. We also look at tips to increase your blog’s traffic.

13 tips for starting a blog and keeping it going (PR Daily)

This article offers helpful advice for those who are new to blogging. For novices, blogging can be intimidating, but the career and personal benefits of blogging far surpass the initial difficulties. “I think people have this mistaken idea that successful blogging is some mystical voodoo or secret sauce. It’s not,” entrepreneurism blogger Daniel DiPiazza says. To eliminate this mystery, he offers 13 tips about what it truly Friday Five Logotakes to create a successful blog.

Tips include:

  • Working on a WordPress platform;
  • Creating an “about me” or “about us” page; and
  • Posting several times a week.

The author also encourages bloggers to concentrate on high-quality content. Andrew Schrage, co-owner of personal finance blog MoneyCrashers.com, explains that blogs should “strive to provide readers with tips and advice that can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet… Draw upon your past business experiences to provide readers with unique and insightful commentary.” Visit the article for the full list of tips.

4 Ways to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Pack (Search Engine Watch)

Blogs have become an important tool in SEO, and because of this, more than 68 million exist on WordPress alone – in total, there are more than “150 million blogs on the internet.” Given this high level of competition for viewers, bloggers must learn how to stand out from the crowd and earn the viewership they desire. While content is important, it’s not the only component that helps blogs become successful. This article outlines four ways that can help your blog stand out in the blogosphere: Be controversial, make lists, solve a problem and take a stand.

The first tip, be controversial, emphasizes that readers are fascinated by controversy. Author Jayson DeMers explains: “People love controversial topics, regardless of whether they agree with what you have to say… Writing controversial content is a great way to get people to read your blog, share your posts, and comment on them, which drives social signals and activity.” For more details about controversial posting, and for explanations of the other tips, visit the article.

5 Must Follow Rules While Writing Long Blog Posts (Business2Community)

Long blogs offer the opportunity for more backlinks than short blogs – and opportunities to increase readership – however drafting a long blog is no easy feat. Because a large amount of information and content is shared in long posts, it’s easy to make minor mistakes that alter the readability and effectiveness of the post. There are five rules to focus on when writing a long blog: avoid repetition, include images, make it easy to read and navigate through, place share buttons at the bottom and don’t force it.

One of the rules, “make it easy to read and navigate through” focuses on tailoring your post to improve readers’ experiences. According to the article, “It is important to ensure that long blog posts are easy to read and navigate through as it is going to be time consuming to read them. You can do this by using simple words, writing short sentences, cutting down everything into short paragraphs, using subheadings and bold text wherever necessary.” Details on all five rules can be read via the article.

The Hidden Content Gem Marketers Aren’t Utilizing (Entrepreneur)

Blogs are one of the most useful content sources that fall by the wayside for many brands. Because of the changes in SEO and the growing importance of producing solid content, blogs offer the opportunity to generate desired “customer engagement, acquire more customers and boost reputation status” by offering itself as a platform for the ideal “long-form content, or text pieces that tends to more than 2,000 words in length.”

According to the article, “Basically, if you follow Google’s recommendations – including using schema markup, adding Google authorship and providing data on your organization, among others – you stand a chance of having your content ranked in a special section of Google. Getting ranked in these special search results can be a huge traffic boon for your website, as well as a boost to your business’s perceived authority within your industry.” Visit the article for blog content suggestions that can boost your SEO.

How to Build Your Website’s Traffic from Zero to 10k in 3 months (BloggingTips.com)

This article highlights an area that many bloggers look to improve upon: traffic generation. Troy Bombardia, author of the article and blogger, shares three tips about how to grow your number of page views based on experience from his own blog. Bombardia uses the Ghost platform, an alternative, but similar platform to WordPress, and has seen dramatic growth in his pageviews. His tips to achieving similar growth are: finding the right topic, guest posting and forum commenting.

Finding the right topic can be done by “choos[ing] a niche that isn’t crowded. When you write in an unpopulated niche, virtually everyone interested in that niche will become your readers.” Guest posts can generate “referral traffic IF you guest post on the right blogs” and can “help your SEO.” The final tip, forum commenting, is most effective when done on a forum “that is very relevant to your niche. Whenever someone asks a question that one of your website’s articles can answer, put a link on that thread to your site.” For more details on increasing your traffic, visit the article.

Faith Goumas is the public relations associate at the Public Relations Society of America.

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Faith Goumas

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