In an internet marketing environment saturated with blogs of every description, it’s an excellent idea to use whatever blogging tools are at your disposal to make your content stand out. More and more businesses are taking advantage of blogging as a means of communication with customers, potential customers, and colleagues.

blogging tools

Improve your content marketing by taking the following tips into account for your next (or first) post:

  • Start it off right. At Boost Blog Traffic, Marsha Stopa advises the use of WordPress in her piece on improving your blog productivity. She writes: “We’re adamant on this tool: only WordPress…WordPress has become the industry standard…It’s customizable to support a range of functions as your blog grows and you can set up a good-looking blog without knowing how to code.” Stopa also advises the use of WordPress’ premium themes. “Premium themes are updated regularly to keep pace with WordPress upgrades and new trends. Plus, they maintain support desks that will help you with setup, problems, customization, upgrades and maintenance.”
  • Prepare. As Mary Green from Social Media Fuze suggests, take the time to prepare a plan for your post. Consider your SEO keywords, a clear topic which is articulated in the title of the post, your persona (remember who you are writing for and how they would want the content presented to them, and a call to action; consider what you have to give to readers as you can “tease readers through the content to make the call to action more effective.”
  • Generate Ideas. Without a doubt, the most common problem I hear from blogging newbies is a lack of ideas. Last year on my inbound marketing blog, I shared my own methodology for generating 360 Content Marketing Ideas in 30 Minutes. “Ideally, you want to come up with lots of content marketing ideas that are aligned with your keyword strategy. Your keyword strategy should include three buckets; foundation keywords, opportunity keywords and long tail keywords. The methodology I’m going to describe uses foundation keywords as a starting point to find long tail keywords that you can turn into blog posts.”
  • Seek advice. Take guidance from professional bloggers. A Raven Internet Marketing Tools piece asked pro bloggers what their favorite tools are. According to the post, for subject ideas, Chris Brogan utilizes Twitter search. “Perfect for identifying trending topics, popular ideas and developing concepts.” Among others, the post also refers to Google Insights for Search and Mindmeister, both free, which: “uncover and compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and other Google properties” and help “you to build and plan an idea [with] a collaboration feature and syncs with your mobile” respectively.
  • Create your content. Raven quotes Frank Reed, Managing Editor at Marketing Pilgrim: “The real difference between a beginner and an EXPERIENCED blogger…is the development of their style, voice and following.” Concentrate on creating content that is distinctly yours. Make sure it reflects you or your business’ vision. Two products among those recommended by Raven to ease your content creation process include Scribe Fire and Addict o matic. Scribe Fire (a free Firefox and Chrome extension) allows an individual or business with multiple blogs to post to all blog regardless of the platform. Addict o matic, whose tag line is: “‘Inhale the web’…searches the web for the hottest topic, spits out the results and then you can create and share a custom page.”

These are just a few suggestions to improve your blog productivity and quality. Search out the resources and tools that will work the best for your business and don’t forget to take your cue from other pro bloggers who can share their best practices with you.

SOURCES:

http://socialmediafuze.com/40-point-blogging-checklist/

http://raventools.com/blog/ultimate-list-of-blogging-tools-for-pros/

http://boostblogtraffic.com/blogging-tools/

https://www.libertydigital.net/how-to-generate-360-content-marketing-ideas-in-30-minutes/