Keep Content Fresh

This is the first and most important thing to remember about having a blog: you have to always keep it up to date. That includes making sure you post on a regular schedule, keeping your content relevant and up to date with current trends in your industry, and making sure the content you do publish is interesting to your blog visitors. A good way to keep up with the current trends is to follow companies like Inc., Ad Age, and Entrepreneur online, or through a magazine subscription. These companies have content that is always current and fresh for business leaders.

Vibrant and Interesting Media

The aesthetic appeal of your blog directly follows the importance of having fresh content on your list of "blog essentials." No one wants to visit a blog devoid of pictures, gifs, or video content. In the same way that brick and mortar stores try to decorate the inside of their store or office building with an aesthetically pleasing decor and style, so must your blog have interesting things for visitors to view. Even if you're just using stock images to spice up your blog, every little bit helps. Atwill Media provides you with a ton of different options for stock images, and we even allow you to upload photos to be used in your blog! And if you aren't graphically skilled, there are easy programs, such as Canva, that can help even the least creative people (including me) freshen up the look of their blog!

Encourage Sharing

Nothing ever gets into the eyes of consumers without being shared. Think about billboards. These simple advertising tools are shared with thousands of people at busy city intersections every day, effectively ingraining the product being advertised into the minds of tons of consumers. Now, think of social media as a huge city intersection. If you want to get your product (in this case, your blog post) into all of those info hungry consumers minds, you have to share it! Not only that, you have to encourage others to share it as well. You'll be surprised at how quickly your blog view numbers will jump up with just a few shares by people who loved reading your blog.

Keep Readers Informed Through Newsletters/Email

Lots of companies with blogs use newsletters as a way to make sure that readers never miss a post. If you keep your blog updated every week, then you can send a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter with all the posts published in those weeks. This gets the posts directly into the hands of everyone that is subscribed to your email list. You can also use email lists to send out special emails to all your subscribers informing them about the blog, in case they didn't know you had one.

Watch Your Analytics

Lots of blogs allow you to check the analytics of your blog and all of your posts, to see how well people are responding to it. Google Analytics is a big service that allows you to check how many visitors and clicks you get, and also other things like time spent on the page, and bounce rate. It's a handy tool to gauge whether your blog is effective.

Fill Out The SEO/Meta Information

This is a big key to getting your blog found on search engines that, unfortunately, many people forget to do. They might even ignore it because they don't see how it will help them, or are uneducated about what the meta information does for their blog. Plain and simple, the meta information, that you can fill out on any page of your website, is key to getting your blog found by search engines. Using keywords, and a good meta description, your blog is more likely to be found by people searching for certain services online. For example, by including meta keywords like "Arkansas," "Paragould," "website services," "website builder," and "custom website" in our meta information, Atwill Media is more likely to be ranked higher by search engines when people search for things like "custom website design in Arkansas." Having solid, accurate meta information is vital to the process of getting found online.

Atwill Media makes it easy for you to start your very own blog for your business. To start a blog post, simply log in to your website administrator settings, click on Add To Site on your toolbar, and then click on Add New Blog Post!