There are, worldwide, around 5.5 billion active internet users. Granted, not all of those people are potential customers for your business. The important part is that ideal customers for your business are almost certainly in that group.
The question is: How do you reach them?
There are many effective digital marketing strategies you can deploy, but one of the most straightforward options is the humble blog. It’s a format people understand and gives you extraordinary latitude to convey your message.
If you don’t excel at writing, though, you may want to consider blog writing services to augment your own blogging efforts. Not sure how to make the most of a blog writing service? Keep reading for five tips that will help you leverage blog content writing services to the best effect.
Even the best blog writing services will struggle in an information vacuum. These services work best when they understand your overall content strategy and goals.
For example, are you looking to demonstrate expertise and build authority? Are you looking to promote specific products or services?
While there is often a bit of crossover between these kinds of blogs, they generally aim at different ends. Building expertise and authority is an end goal for a classic content marketing strategy.
You win the trust of visitors by providing them with reliable information, practical advice, and even industry analysis. That trust will eventually convert into sales.
If you’re aiming to boost the sales of specific products or services, the blog will take on a more promotional tone that focuses on the features or benefits of particular products and services.
A frank discussion at the beginning will help the service meet your blog writing needs.
It’s impossible to talk about blog writing without talking about SEO. One of the big reasons why companies write blogs is to boost their SEO results.
Search engines prefer websites that post new content often and consistently. That means you must discuss content frequency with a potential blog writing service. You need a service that can deliver the volume of blogs you want every single month.
Beyond simple frequency, you must also consider how search engines rank content and web pages. While keywords are not the last word in SEO, they do play a significant role in how a search engine will display the content from your website in search results.
In essence, you need keywords that revolve around your specific business or industry.
There are two main strategies you can take with keywords.
Option one is that you provide the blog writing service with the keywords you want them to use. If you excel at keyword research, this is a practical approach to take with SEO blog writing services.
The other option is picking a service that offers keyword research. Not every service offers this option.
Topic selection can go a few different ways depending on how the service is set up and your own needs.
Some businesses have very specific topics they want covered. Some businesses even want those topics covered in a specific order. Other businesses are content to let the service generate blog topics for them.
There are pros and cons to each approach. Providing a list of topics and a desired order of coverage lets you develop a core body of blog posts.
This can help a business establish expertise and authority around a specific area of an industry or business type. The pitfall is that it doesn’t leave much room for addressing rapid industry changes or events.
Letting the service pick topics does allow for that kind of coverage of rapidly shifting industry trends. The main pitfall with this kind of approach is that you may end up with a lot of blogs on industry-specific topics, but not focused on a specific area.
Linking in blog posts and on websites is another area that sometimes gets a bit too much attention, but it’s also not something you can ignore. Part of the reason is that search engines put a value on the quality of your linking.
You should have a discussion with your blog writing service about their linking strategy. For blog posts, there are two kinds of links that you can control: internal and outbound links.
Internal links are simply links from one place on your site to another place on your site. Ideally, these links will lead to more relevant content or related products and services you offer.
Outbound links lead away from your website to another site. In most cases, these links take the reader to supporting information. You want these links to take audiences to respected sources of information, such as leading industry publications or governmental sites that offer statistical data.
Minimally, your discussion with the service should touch on the kinds of sites you find acceptable for outbound links.
Voice is one of those tricky areas of writing, but it’s also critical in blog writing. Voice encompasses a lot of things, but a lot of it boils down to tone and attitude.
You want the voice used for your blog posts to consistently reflect the tone and attitude of your brand. Discuss your overall brand voice with the blog writing service in advance.
If you don’t, you can end up with perfectly serviceable blog posts that require substantial rewriting either by you or the blog writing service.
Not every business has a great writer on staff to handle writing a weekly blog post. This is where blog writing services enter the picture.
If you want to get the most from such a service, there are some things you should discuss with them. You must discuss your overall strategy, topic selection, and brand voice with them. This ensures you get the kind of blog content.
You should also discuss SEO, keyword selection, and linking with them.
Underground offers blog writing services in the UAE. If you think we’d be a good fit for you, check out our work.
