21 Blog Post Writing Tips for Ad Agency New Business

This is my collection of writing tips to help you consistently generate great content that produces inbound leads for your agency’s new business through social media.

Content marketing is a great means of converting prospects into clients by creating and freely sharing helpful, informative content that builds awareness and relevant relationships.

I hope that you find these 21 blog post writing tips helpful:

Write to a specific target audience. Having a target audience in mind keeps your writing focused. Plus, the narrower your focus the easier it is to write.
Reading fuels your writing. You need a good strategic reading program with a clear focus that is centered upon your audience’s interest and needs.
Keep headlines simple and direct.
Load each post title with the keywords you want to dominate through search (i.e. “ad agency new business”). This is also helpful to your Twitter audience as well.
Write post titles that are understandable out of context (because headlines often appear without articles, as in search engine results).
Be predictable, so users know whether they’ll like the full article before they click.
The first sentence of your post should be the “takeaway or benefits statement”. Just simply answer the question, what will be my takeaway or benefit if I commit to read this post? This is the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion.
Remember that online readers prefer writing that is concise, easy to scan, and objective (rather than promotional) in style.
Avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Invest this time in writing thorough articles that are of value to your audience.
Publish on a regular schedule. Be consistent in delivering at least 3 to 5 posts per week. This will keep your readers coming back for more. Also, frequently updated content makes search engines happy.
Highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others).
Use often, bulleted or numbered lists. Readers love them. You are basically providing the “readers digest version” or an “executive summary” for your readers. You are doing work on their behalf, highlighting the rich nuggets of content for them and presenting it in an easy-to-read format.
Half the word count (or less) than conventional writing. Usually 350 to 450 words.
Don’t sell. Readers detest “marketes”; the promotional writing style with boastful claims. The moment you start to sell on your agency’s blog is when you will lose your audience.
Include at least one high quality graphic.
Write numbers with digits, not letters (21, not twenty-one).
Use short sentences. Get to the point. Break up long paragraphs. Make your copy easy for a persons eye to scan.
Your blog should become a repository of valued information for your audience. That means that it’s not all original content. I recommend writing 1 original post for every 4 or 5 resource post.
This is an example of a “resource post”: Steve Jobs: 10 Presentation Tactics for Ad Agency New Business. I found this info through my reading program. I made it relevant to my audience, added my own thoughts and provided some additional tips to create more value. It took only 25 to 30 minutes to write.
For original posts, I share my opinions, my point of view. Original posts usually take over and hour to write. Your prospective client audience is searching the internet for good, rich information that solves problems. They are attracted to fresh thinking, writers who have opinions that don’t always follow the status quo.
Think of your reader’s experience. Make your posts easy to find, your blog simple to navigate. Highlight popular posts, provide links to additional resources. Make their interaction with your blog’s content a pleasant experience.

Here are a few thoughts on repurposing content from your blog and maximize the return on your time investment:

Don’t ever think that just because you’ve written it, everyone has read it. Repurpose content in a bi-weekly or at least monthly eNewsletter. It can take as little as 15 minutes to create and provide a great return on your time investment.
Take your most popular blog post, add some really good images and translate it into PowerPoint or Keynote.
You should also take advantage the time and effort that goes into writing for your blog and compile your best 100 blog posts into a book. You can actually think ahead and create an outline for a book as a guide for your blog post writing.

Some additional agency blogging resources:

This entry was posted on Monday, August 23rd, 2010 at 7:39 am and is filed under Agency Blogs, Agency Leadership, Creating Content, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.