Your agency’s blog can become the “gateway” to introduce your agency to your best prospective clients. But you’ll need to implement some “best practices” to generate serious blog traffic.
Over three years of writing blog posts and assisting agencies in creating and writing for their blogs, here are some blogging tips that I hope you will find helpful. Keep in mind that I’m providing these from a new business perspective to generate inbound leads from your agency’s best target audience
Post titles: Choose a key phrase that you can dominate in Google by using it consistently in your post titles. It may seem to quickly become mundane but after doing this for some 3 years I can tell you that it works.
Posts need to be scan-able: Your audience will primarily be searching for resources. They will peruse through hundreds of articles and post. They tend to scan post titles and copy instead of reading word-for-word. Break up long paragraphs, highlight quotes, Bold key phrases, and words, use numbered list and bullet points, etc.
Two kinds of post: original content and resourced content. Most of your posts are going to be resources you’ve found. Your agency blog becomes a repository of information for your audience of prospective clients. A one-stop-shop about trends, research, industry news, conferences and seminars, tips, tactics and tools to help meet your audience meet their marketing, advertising challenges.
Share what you learn: Every new tool or bit of knowledge you gain, share it with your audience. Make it specific to them and their needs. But always write from a position of expertise not as a newbie.
Always lead with the benefit: Provide the “take-away” the “benefit” at the very beginning of each post. This is similar to the inverted pyramid style of writing used by newspaper reporters.
Make your post pleasing to the eye: Include a good graphic image or photo in every post.
Do the work for your audience: Make content easy to find through a category index, additional post titles and links at the end of a post that would also be of interest. Highlight popular posts and your signature posts that provide your unique point-of-view and philosophy. Provide links to additional networked links that are also good resources for your audience.
Find the original source: When researching information, find and provide links and credit to the original source of the information you share. It provides more credibility to your writing.
Engage your audience: Ask for their feedback, their points of view, additional resources, etc.
Summarize post content: Especially with resource posts, summarize your content into bulleted or numbered lists, pull out the key nuggets from your sources, provide a Readers Digest version of the content by again doing the grunt work on behalf of your readers.
Make your post of value. Don’t waste your audiences time, having them clicking through to your blogs content if it is going to enrich and benefit them in some way. In other words, don’t write just to write. Make sure its the kind of content that you would want to take the time to read. I am excited every time I find a nugget of information that I know will be of help to my audience.
Share your networks: Through your posts, introduce your audience to others that are part of your network that they should also get to know and how to connect with them. Utilize guests posts, interviews, podcasts, etc.
These tips should get you started. Please feel free to share YOUR best blog writing tips.
Here are some additional resources for creating an agency blog for new business:
Posted by Michael Gass 
