Start­ing A Suc­cess­ful Blog That Re­flects Your Brand

„Every­one else has a blog.  We should too!”

It’s the phrase heard in ex­ec­u­tive board­rooms around the coun­try. A blog is a great way to mar­ket your busi­ness, but it’s im­por­tant for your blog to re­flect your brand. Dis­cover six ways to make sure your blog re­flects your brand.

De­sign your blog - Al­though it should seem ob­vi­ous, your blog should have the same look and feel as your web­site - the two should fit to­gether seam­lessly and flow from one area to the next. When you’re de­sign­ing your web­site, in­te­grate your blog into the nav­i­ga­tion, or add „lat­est posts” to your side­bar. Many con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, like Word­Press, al­low you to de­sign sta­tic pages and blog post pages to fit to­gether seam­lessly. Make sure your read­ers can eas­ily com­ment, share and sub­scribe, and make sure your font col­ors align with your brand.

De­ter­mine your niche - Ac­cord­ing to some stud­ies, there are more than 164 mil­lion blogs in the United States alone, and more than 123 mil­lion peo­ple read­ing blogs. With more blogs than peo­ple read­ing them, your blog has to stand out among oth­ers in your industry.

Your first step is to think about what you’ll write about - your niche. This is a main fo­cus for your blog that can help you de­velop a more ac­tive au­di­ence, drive search en­gine traf­fic to your site and help strengthen your brand. This might be easy if you have a highly spe­cial­ized busi­ness, but if your in­dus­try is more gen­eral - health­care, fi­nance and in­dus­try or sales - you’ll have to use other el­e­ments to stand out. De­ter­mine how you’re dif­fer­ent, and use your blog con­tent to show­case your differences.

Show your per­son­al­ity - So­cial me­dia has forced or­ga­ni­za­tions into be­ing more trans­par­ent than ever. Com­pa­nies have to have a per­son­al­ity that shows through in their mar­ket­ing and com­mu­ni­ca­tions ef­forts. A blog is a great way to tran­si­tion your com­pany per­son­al­ity from short ad­ver­tise­ment copy or newslet­ters to reg­u­lar two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion with your customers.

Be con­sis­tent - If you’re plan­ning to start a blog - or al­ready have - con­sider the time in­vest­ment you will have to make it suc­cess­ful. You must post high-qual­ity con­tent reg­u­larly to make an im­pact for your brand. Whether your blog is sev­eral small posts daily or an in-depth ar­ti­cle once a week, set an ed­i­to­r­ial cal­en­dar and choose reg­u­lar post­ing days. Your cus­tomers will learn to ex­pect the fre­quency of your posts and are more likely to come back and read more. Con­sis­tency with your blog can also give you reg­u­lar, fresh ma­te­r­ial to make so­cial me­dia fans happy as well as Google, who place a high pri­or­ity on fresh, rel­e­vant content.

Cre­ate great con­tent - Read­ers and con­sumers of your brand are much more likely to come back to your blog if you’re shar­ing great, cus­tom con­tent. There are hun­dreds of sources, from event re­caps to tes­ti­mo­ni­als, link „roundups” from other in­dus­try blogs to news. If you don’t’ have time to write posts, think about hir­ing a free­lance blog­ger to search for ideas and write your posts weekly. In­te­grate video and pho­tos for a mul­ti­me­dia el­e­ment. Use Google Ad­words key­word an­a­lyzer to find hot top­ics in your in­dus­try or trend­ing sto­ries that you could tie into your own brand. Set up Google alerts for key­words, lo­ca­tions or other in­for­ma­tion that would make a great story. Set an ed­i­to­r­ial cal­en­dar with ever­green sto­ries that can be used any­time - this way, you can write blog posts in ad­vance and never have to write one at the last minute.

Cross pro­mote - Guest post­ing is a great way to in­tro­duce your blog and brand to a new au­di­ence. Reach out to other com­pa­nies in your in­dus­try who run blogs and ask if they have guest-post­ing spots avail­able. Con­sider open­ing up your blog to them for cross pro­mo­tion - they may be look­ing for new con­tent on their blog, too.