When is the last time you ran out of ideas for your blog? It happens even to the best of marketers.
A blog can be a fun and engaging medium for connecting with your audience. It helps you build authority and generate genuine responses. But it can eat up a lot of your time, too.
Even if you post only two or three times a week, you may have to invest a few hours into it every week. You could outsource your blog content instead and invite guest bloggers to your blog.
But even so, don’t be surprised if creating and managing your blog turns out to take more time than you have. Even more than managing your Facebook or Twitter pages.
About Freshness
A fresh blog is a good blog. Without freshness, visitors will quickly lose their interest. They won’t come back. And they won’t share it, either.
In this post, we’re bringing you some business blogging tips that can help you keep your blog fresh. Without spending too much time or money on content.
Yes, you can do that without lowering the quality of your content or losing readers. Put these blogging tips into action now!
1. Focus on Evergreen Content
There’s nothing wrong about industry news or articles on upcoming events and product launches. Many of your readers enjoy that kind of content. Such content is also valuable for search engine optimization (SEO).
However, news and updates have a short life shelf. After the event has passed or the news died down, they become little more than files in your blog archive.
By contrast, evergreen content stays fresh for longer. It can generate traffic and engagement for weeks, months, and even years. Evergreen content focuses on timeless topics.
It can come in the form of in-depth guides, exhaustive lists, or entertaining videos. While it requires more work than average content, evergreen content proves a better investment in the long term.
So, how do you create evergreen content? Pick a topic that people will be interested in two years from now. Usually, it’s more general topics that work well for this. Tackle it from all perspectives. Use all the information about it you can find. Make it positive and inspiring.
2. Make It Visual
For most business blogs, the standard post format is an article with one or more images. It’s a good format that can pack a lot of information. But it’s a time-consuming format — who will do all that writing? Besides, it needs editing, proofreading, and possibly revisions and updates over time. One way to add freshness to your blog while posting less is to explore different content formats.
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Image galleries
- Images with inspiration quotes
- Impromptu, behind-the-scenes videos of employees at work
- Simple infographics
- Polls and surveys that stimulate participation
- Slideshows generated from reports and case studies
In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, visual content can help you rally your audience to your cause. But remember that visual content also requires planning and careful development. You can’t just grab stock photos, copy-paste a quote over them, and expect great engagement. Well, you can, but it won’t work.
3. Reblog Content
WordPress has a simple reblog feature that allows you to repost old content. Other blogging platforms have similar features that make re-posting easy.
Reblogged content isn’t as good for SEO as fresh new content. But even though it may be years old, it can relieve you for a time from the need to create more content. If you’ve been running your business blog for years, dig deep into your archive to find timeless posts that are still relevant today.
You shouldn’t reblog too much content too often. Also, make it a rule not to reblog content that’s less than one year old, or you may come across as spammy.
Whenever you reblog an old piece, write a simple explanation for why you’re doing it. Tell your audience why that content is still relevant. Quite often, you can tie it with something in the news or a new milestone that your company has reached.
4. Choose Topics that Generate Discussions
Some posts can renew themselves through comments and shares. You could call them viral, but that definition alone does not do them justice.
Usually, it’s posts that are outspoken, provocative, or controversial that stay fresh for longer. Such posts can continue to receive comments, likes, and shares for weeks. One of the best blogging tips for keeping your blog fresh is to consider every post you create in terms of its potential to generate discussions. Often, it’s not just the topic that matters, but how you address it.
For example, a post may be well written and offer great insight into a problem, but people can easily forget about it once they “consume” it.
A post created to kickstart a discussion, which invites readers to share their opinions, may not be nearly as informative. But it could keep people commenting and coming back to your blog for weeks. Some may even subscribe to the discussion using email, or share the post on social media.
5. Drop the Keywords Now and Then
Business blogs need keywords to improve their online visibility. Keywords can also help keep a blog organized, by limiting it to certain themes. But this limitation can be one of the enemies of freshness. That’s because, over time, keywords can become exhausted.
Even if you tackle topics from different perspectives, you may sound like you’re rehashing the same old content. Keywords help you build specificity, but once your blog becomes specific, they can lose their edge.
It can be a lot easier to create fresh content for your blog once you drop the keywords. You don’t have to drop them entirely. Just going keyword free for a week or two could be all you need.
Have you enjoyed this post? We sure hope so!
Why don’t you try out some of our other blogging tips? Find out how to use a blog for business or how to write good content for your blog.