Create Original Content for your Blog
If you are going to use your blog it’s important that you do it right. The more corners you cut the less effective it’s going to be. Ideally you should be aiming to post to your blog at least once a day (although time constraints can make this difficult) so it can be tempting to find an article you like, copy the content and paste it onto your blog. Even if you fully credit the original author to avoid plagiarism you are still not really gaining anything out of doing it. This is because what you have just created is duplicate content. Duplicate content won’t necessarily hurt your rankings but it won’t help them either. You are just creating more white noise in the background of the internet that most crawlers will ignore.
If you are a little naughtier and decide to copy someone else’s content and pass it off as your own then you have bigger problems to worry about aside from your SEO rankings. You are now walking on the fine line of plagiarism and copyright infringement, as well as just being rude. Not only will the original owner of the content have the ability to pursue action against you, but the negative PR could be a disaster for your company. You’ll never establish yourself as a good content creator or leader in your field if people find out your content is copied (Which a quick google search with a check on the dates should show) and you are just hurting your image. The short story here is to spend some time sitting down and writing the content yourself, because if you aren’t going to write it yourself then you are just wasting your own time.
Reply to comments and Social Media
When you start to use your blog for the first time you might find that not very many people actually comment or give you feedback. This is because your blog is still quite young and you aren’t well known yet. When you eventually receive your first piece of feedback it could be negative, but you shouldn’t let this get you down. If it is constructive then you should read your blog from their point of view and act on their criticism accordingly. If however it’s just rude or offensive then we recommend you delete it. Censorship is something we are strongly against but there is a difference between negative feedback and verbal abuse.
When you start to get comments, either on the blog or social media, it’s important that you reply to them. This will let the person know that you have read their message and appreciate their feedback. This could cause another person to reply, or could cause the same person to come back and read more. Customer service is one of the most important parts of your business and this is true for blogging too. If you were having a conversation in real life with a friend you wouldn’t just ignore one of their comments, so don’t do it on twitter either.
Post Regularly
You’ve finally got to grips with how to use your blog and it’s now time to start posting. Unfortunately by the time you have finished writing your first sentence your excitement has left and you are left feeling like you are writing an essay for school again. Because of this reason it’s common when you first use a blog to only post once every few days, or maybe even once a week. This is not something that we recommend you do. Hubspot did a fantastic article on how regularly you should blog, but the take home message is simple:
Use your blog as often as you can.
The chart below shows that by producing 16+ blog posts per month, you are getting 3.5X the traffic of those that only produce 4.
Do you know how to correctly use your blog? Think we have missed something? Got your own advice? Leave us your comments below and we’ll get back to you. If you would rather outsource your blog to someone else then drop us an email and we’ll talk with you about what we can do for you. If you have a blog it’s important that you use it, even if this means paying someone else to write the content. It’s not money wasted, because it’s a return on investment.
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