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It’s undeniable - blogs are a powerful way to generate content for your web site and social media campaigns, and to place you as an expert in your field. While most marketers understand its value, they procrastinate on contribut-ing to a blog for a number of reasons, primarily because:

1. They’re not confident of their writing ability. 2. They don’t feel that their subject matter is interesting enough. 3. They don’t think they have the time. 4. They don’t see a direct correlation between their blog posts and increased sales.

While these reasons may all be valid, none of them are insurmountable and none of them should prevent you from blogging to promote yourself as a thought leader. With this paper, we’ll look at each of these in depth, as well as provide some tips that will make your posts better optimized for search, more shareable, and more effective at building your business.

To your success,

Patrick King

Founder + CEO, Imagine

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Content (and how you deliver it) is King. You know you need to blog, but if your posts aren’t insightful or are hard to read, you’ve just wasted your time. It is very important that the posts you publish are informative and engaging, and aware that people don’t have a ton of time to read your posts. Do right by your readers, and they’ll do right by you by sharing your content.

Create Great Titles A great title can cause a post to spread across the Internet like wildfire, or fizzle out without notice. These few words are the first thing a reader sees and tells them whether or not it’s worth reading, so it’s important to make it catchy and intriguing, even provocative. Don’t be surprised if you spend just as much time mulling over a good title as you do writing the entire post. It’s typical, and worth your time.

Some good examples of blog post titles include ones that ask a question or mention a list (“Top 10…”, “How to…” and “Five Ways to…” are big ones). You’ll also need to put a strong keyword phrase in that title, but more on SEO later.

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Levity, Brevity and Wit These are three tips used for public speaking, and they’re just as relevant in your posts. You’re not writing a technical paper. Keep the topic light and easy to read. Dial back the jargon and use a more conversational tone. In fact, starting out a post with a bit of humor is an awesome icebreaker – just make sure it’s relevant, brief and not offensive.

In terms of length, less is definitely more. Find a way to condense your con-tent, using fewer words to get your idea across. Your readers won’t have an abundant amount of time to read your article, so keep it between 300-500 words (which may seem like a lot, but words add up quick). Any more than that will probably be ignored.

One quick note that’s worth mentioning: Don’t just write a post because you feel like you have to. If the content is mediocre, you’ll lose the traction you’ve built in readership. If you’re low on content or are not in a good place to post, put it off a day, but not indefinitely.

Check Your Spelling and Grammar I know most of us (myself included) don’t have English degrees or the time to become a concise writer, but it’s hard to come across as someone to be taken seriously if you confuse “their”, “they’re” and “there”. Fortunately, technology has our back. Start your posts as a Word document, and as you’re writing, fix those colored underlines that pop up when you misspell a word or use less-than-appropriate grammar.

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Make Social Sharing Easy Just about every blog platform available has tools that can make “liking” or sharing your post effortless. Our personal favorite here is WordPress, since it has so many plugins that offer this type of functionality. A couple of our favorites are AddThis (http://www.addthis.com) and Socialize (http://www.jonbishop.com/downloads/wordpress-plugins/socialize).

Before you publish, read it out loud. It’s the best way to spot errors in your post. Also, by reading aloud, you’re able to get your personality and tone into the content. It can be easy to sound “stiff” when you’re watching your grammar, so you’ll need some prac-tice before you’re relaxed and can find the voice that works best for you.

Optimize Your Post for Search Wouldn’t it be great if the visitors to your blog post read other articles during their visit? Link topics of your posts to other related articles, to keep them going, and build keyword phrases into your posts (2-3 word phrases that you expect people to Google and find your post), bolding and inserting into titles and header text wherever possible.

Finally, add alt tags (the mouse-over tooltips) to the images you place in the post. This is important for your search engine visibility.

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Add Plenty of Pictures Let’s face it: reading a post that’s nothing but words on a page can be mind-numbing. We all know that people respond better to images (particularly humorous ones), and it does a great job of breaking up the text. Just re-member to tag those pictures properly!

End With A Question For the readers that have remained engaged enough to get to the end of your post, keep the conversation going. Adding a question at the end as a call to action, you show your readers that their opinion is wanted. You’ll be surprised by how much you learn from the responses!

Finally, you should bear in mind that practice makes perfect. The more you post, the easier it will become, the less time it will take you, and the more engagement you’ll see from your readers. Happy blogging!

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ABOUT IMAGINE Founded in 2004 with $14 and a dream, Imagine is an integrated marketing, branding and design firm that combines Northern Virginia’s flair for innovation with Chicago’s warm per-sonality and West Coast creativity. We’re an industry-leading group of problem solvers that believe that marketing can’t truly be effective unless it’s integrated, and handled by dedicat-ed experts in each field.

Our primary responsibility is to be a part of your team – one that fits comfortably into your overall strategic and organizational frameworks. Whether involved with advertising, creative concepts, digital strategy and design, search engine marketing and display advertising, SEO, site optimization testing or video production and social media, we understand the necessary role we will need to play to deliver high-impact, cost-effective marketing.

PREPARED JUNE 2013

P U B L I S H E D B Y I M A G I N E • W A S H I N G T O N , D C • C H I C A G O , I L • S A N D I E G O , C A • W W W. I M A G I N E D C . N E T