There is really no question these days that blogging is considered a highly effective marketing tool. Blogging is a great way to showcase your content and easily create awareness of your product and get clients and customers to interact with you (and each other). Because blogging was designed as a social media platform, having good blog content is essential if you want to have any kind of interaction with your intended prospect. Interaction can be in the form of sharing your content, commenting on your posts, taking some sort of action based upon the content of your post (such as hiring you).

Moreover, it also increases your website rankings can increase because the blog is constantly being updates, commented on, and discussions are always going on. Because of its sheer activity, the rankings improve, creating more awareness of the product.

Tips to keep in mind when blogging about your product or service:

Never make the blog post too long unless the content warrants it. It must be well-written. Long posts tend to get dreary and they are not ‘catchy’ enough for people to sit and go through them.

The exceptions are a) when you are telling a story and b) when you are giving technical instructions or “how to do something” instructions.

Vary the length of your blog posts to keep them interesting and keep people coming back.

Some random blog topics to write about:

• Lists are very popular to write about. They are easy to read and digest. Create your own “Top 10”, “Best of” or Most Notable lists and share them with your readers. The Alphabetizer is a website and tool that can easily put your list into alphabetical order.
• Write about other people. People like to read success stories so occasionally share other people’s successes (and failures) to make a point and keep interest levels high. And when you write about other people, you just might get their attention and create more connections.
• Write about events in your industry, your community, the world.
• Curate content and share other people’s great stuff. Mari Smith is brilliant at this. She does a weekly roundup of social media content she finds on the web. With WordPress, it is super easy to share great content written by others. There are several free and inexpensive plugins to help you do this. One I recently found is Express Curate (totally free).
• Speaking of curating content, I just found this great tool called Screenr. It allows you to create instant screencasts, add your message and share it on Twitter. Totally cool! You can share your blog content or

Don’t Know What to Write About? Get Ideas From Hubspots Blog Topic Generator – its free.

Other tips:

• Update regularly. Since you don’t need to write long posts, that is not much effort. Ideally, blog 3-7 times a week.
• Be professional. Check spelling and grammar. One tool I use that is great is Respelt – a free online tool that checks your blog’s spelling. You can try it out by copy and pasting a post’s content into the field on the home page, or entering a URL and then hit “check”.
• Be entertaining where required, everyone can do with some light-hearted humor, without being derogatory.
• Use Graphics. Video and photo blogging provide interesting ways to share your thoughts, and make your content shareable. PhotoPin is an amazing tool for finding creative commons photos that will add the visual content to your blog that people love to see.
• Make sure you have Google Analytics to measure what phrases are currently driving traffic to your site.

Remember to Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

Do not duplicate, imitate or copy someone else’s content. PERIOD.

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• What you Should Write About
• How Often you Should Post
• How to Add Pictures, Videos, Podcasts and More
• How to Syndicate Your Content
• How to Link your Blog to other Social Media
• How to Monetize Your Blog
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photo credit: Tilde via photopin (license)