A blog can be the most powerful business marketing tool, if it is used properly. Here is a quick list that will help you grade your current blog and determine whether it will strengthen your reputation, sell your product or service, and increase your online exposure.
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Value of Content
Search your blog post titles. Do your blog posts offer insight and information? Or, do your blogs repeat information which has been promoted in hundreds of other articles.
Can potential customers use your information in their decision making process?
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Quality of Language and Grammar
What impression will people have after reading your blog? Here is one test. Have an editor go through a few blog posts. How many words can they remove without taking away the meaning of the article?
How many grammar mistakes are in the article? Is the article well written? Is the message written using good sentence structure and vocabulary?
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Topic Focus
There are several questions that you can ask when assessing your topics. This section is not as clear as the other sections of this article. The questions will change depending on the brand, purpose, and objective of the article.
Some industries lend themselves to news stories, or promoting published papers. Others focus on relationship building and strengthening. Ultimately, do the blog topics appeal to your target audience?
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Objective
Do your articles meet their core objectives?
- Does your article have a key action?
- Is it written for your target demographic?
- Does it meet the current ‘trending’ topics (social media listening)?
- What problem does the article solve?
- Does it establish your website as the ‘authority’?
- Are you different or better than the competition?
- Have you set up a way to measure success of an article?
- Is there a strategy behind your blog?
- Do you have killer headlines that ‘sell’ your blog and work as ‘ad copy’ to encourage people to click through to your website?
- Are your articles easy to skim through? Can people ‘target’ the information they want?
- Do you keep improving ‘high traffic’ topics, offering more information, new research or news, and solving more problems?
- Are you proud of your blog? Would you read it?
- Do your blogs ever make it into top ranking positions?
- Do people share or quote your content?
- Do people leave real comments on your blog posts or ask questions?
If you’ve reviewed your blog and it’s a little lackluster and you’d like some helping ramping it up, contact us for a customized campaign and quote.