When it comes to internet marketing, it’s not about you—it’s about your audience. If you write about things that only interest you, you’re going to be the only one who reads it.

Most people turn to Google when they have a problem to solve or information that they need, meaning that the more relevant you are to what people need to know, the more popular your posts are going to be. Some people might enjoy hearing your travel stories, but they become extremely relevant when paired with reviews for places that people might plan to go to themselves.

Your personal diary won’t get very high readership, but if you write an interesting and insightful day-to-day account of what you do professionally, professionals and students in your industry will have a great reason to read your blog.

When you write a blog post for your company, it’s your job to make your content relevant, practical, and actionable. Writing that achieves this is called “evergreen” content, because like evergreen trees, it never wilts or fades. It’s your goal to create content that will remain useful to your readers for a long time. This doesn’t mean that you can’t write about news or pop culture happenings, but you need some “pillar posts” that will draw readers to your blog for months or years. If you’re saying “I can’t write my essay for beans, let alone create a blog post!” remember that you can always hire professional writers.

Whether you decide to hire a professional writer or do it yourself here are our top tips on how you can create great content and make your company blog successful in the process.

Create great headlines

The title of your blog post is the number one aspect of your creation that will determine whether people click through or not. Work diligently on your headlines and make sure that they communicate to the reader the value of what you’ve written about while also being entertaining, intriguing, and concise.

It can also help to create an air of mystery surrounding your content—make readers curious about what you’ve posted by giving them just enough information to be interested and wanting more. This can take a delicate hand, but it really pays off.

Make your content visual and scannable

People are visual creatures, especially in the fast-paced internet age. Social media posts that include pictures and/or video get a much higher rate of engagement because they catch the eye, so create infographics, memes, and informative and/or entertaining videos to accompany your blog posts. These are the most shareable types of content, meaning that you will get organic exposure when readers send and post the media you’ve created.

Once a reader clicks through to your blog, they should still be getting content that is visually appealing. This means that a clear outline of your information should be placed in subheadings so that readers can get a sense of what your blog post is about without having to concentrate deeply. Details can be in bullet points or lists. Your audience should be able to take a quick glance at your post and find what they need.

Include a Call to Action that inspires interaction

Many people espouse the practice of putting a “Call to Action” at the end of posts, which ask readers to engage with the post in a particular way. This could be by sharing the post, buying a product, or leaving a comment. Encouraging comments is one of the best ways to get interactions with your blog posts, which are what drive a sense of community and humanity in connection with your brand.

Use SEO best practices

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the art of making sure that Google knows exactly what’s on your page and how useful it is. SEO is a very complicated and ever-evolving subject, but there are a few basic tenets that guide page optimization:

• A. URL – The URL should be descriptive and contain keywords instead of a string of numbers.
• B. Page Title – The title of the page should include keywords as well.
• C. Subheaders – Subheaders, which form the outline of your post, are given extra weight by search engines. Therefore, they should be descriptive and also contain keywords.
• D. Main Content – This is probably the most important part of SEO—the content itself. Many people think that they can get away with “keyword stuffing”, but Google can see through that now and will penalize you for writing things that are unnatural to a human reader’s ears. However, having some keywords is necessary so that search engines know what subject you’re writing about.
• E. Image ALT-Text – For a search engine to properly understand what a graphic depicts, you need to write text that gets attached to the image and describes it.
• F. Meta description – Meta descriptions are short paragraphs that appear under your headline on Google and tell both potential readers and search engines what your content is about. Make sure that yours is concise and intriguing.

Be human

Arguably the most important part of blogging is giving your writing a friendly and approachable tone that remains professional (inspiring trust in the reader) while also serving to entertain. Keep your human audience in mind, even when you’re optimizing for search engines, and you can’t go wrong. What have you learned about blogging for your company? What strategies are you going to try? Let us know in the comments below!