There are something like 2 million blog posts published every day and that number is only set to grow as more brands invest in content marketing. So with all this competition, how are you going to get your blog articles in front of the right people? How will you cut through the noise? To give you a helping hand with this increasingly difficult task we've pulled together 5 tips for improving your company blog. By implementing these recommendations your blog will be more engaging for your target audience, more crawlable for search engines and easier to produce for you. If you'd like to know more about blogging or other aspects of content marketing, visit our website or connect with us on social media. Castleford is the leading content marketing business in Australia and New Zealand with unrivaled experience, scale and global expertise.

1. 5 easy steps to
better blogging
If you were starting a content marketing strategy from scratch,
item one on your to do list would probably be creating a blog.
If you already have a blog, you’ll always be on the lookout for
ways to improve it. So whether it’s the 1st or the 1,000th day
of your content marketing campaign, check out these 5 simple
steps for better blogging.
Castleford

2. There are lots of documents you can create
or download that will help you write an
interesting and effective blog, but here are
two that you absolutely need:
The first is an editorial brief. This sets out
your preferred tone and style, broadly the
topics you plan to cover and may even
establish an editorial line on particular issues.
When you start a company blog, it’s important
to start thinking of yourself like a traditional
publisher – and any publisher, even a student
newspaper, has an editorial brief.
At Castleford, we write and maintain briefs for
each of our clients. The blogs on our website
have briefs. Even our internal blog, which we
only use for company updates and can’t be viewed outside the business, has a
brief so that the different contributors are following some simple rules on what
we do and don’t talk about, how we format our posts and what font sizes and
styles to use.
If you have company brand guidelines that would be the ideal starting point for
your editorial brief. You don’t need to come up with the finished article in one hit.
Instead, think of it as a fluid document, something you’ll want to add to and
update regularly.
Second is an editorial policy. This bit often gets missed, particularly when smaller
organisations venture into blogging for the first time. While your brief sets out what
your blog will look like, you also need a policy on how you’ll produce it.
How do you minimise your risk of libelling someone? Where will you get your
source material from and what are the risks associated with that process? If you’ve
got different people contributing, how do you make sure they’re not stealing
pictures from Google Images?
Your editorial policy can establish best practice across not just your blogging
activity but your content marketing strategy in general. It’s a really useful risk
management tool and it will help the higher-ups feel more comfortable about
what you’re doing in their name.
“Editorial briefs are
absolutely essential for
content marketing. When
there are multiple people
writing, reading, approving
and posting content, it is
crucial that they have a
shared document to refer
back to when they have
different opinions of what
would work best.”
Amanda Gross,
Managing Editor at Castleford
1. Write some rules

3. Once you have your rules, you’re going to
need some ideas. Something that will help to
keep your editorial calendar full of great
content is what we call “sweating your
content assets”. In an interview with Heinz
Marketing, Joe Pulizzi, founder of the
Content Marketing Institute, said that when
he was planning to write a book, he would
blog about each chapter, which then made
writing the book much easier.
This is a really good rule to apply to your
content marketing strategy. If your company produces whitepapers, case studies,
downloadable guides or offline collateral, you should be mining those items for
blog post ideas. You’re not only helping to keep your blog up to date with fresh and
relevant content, you’re also providing an opportunity to highlight or link to those
documents that may be either not available online or buried deeper in your
site’s hierarchy.
Linking to related content is great for SEO and it will also help drive users to
valuable and useful information that they otherwise may not have found. This can
be especially handy for marketers who may have control over the blog, but might
have to defer to the IT department for what happens on the rest of the site. You
might not be able to get five years of whitepapers organised how you want or easily
crawlable, but you can blog about them and link to them without opening a new
tech ticket.
This tactic works just as well with other content assets. If you’ve created or
commissioned an infographic, for example, it shouldn’t just be sat on your blog
looking pretty. You should be writing articles about it, promoting it on your social
media and reaching out to other bloggers who might want to use it. More people
will see your graphic and you’ll get more use out of all the good research and prep
that went into it.
“When I start thinking
about writing a book, I start
putting the chapter together
and then blog them out one
by one. It makes the actual
book writing process so
much easier and efficient”
Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the
Content Marketing Institute
2. Sweat your content assets

4. Part of the value of sweating your content
assets is that it encourages you to explore,
not just the different topics your audience
might be interested in, but also the different
types of content you can use to get your
message across.
Embracing content diversity will help your
blog stay fresh, engaging and ahead of the
competition. People often think of blogging
as a place for news updates, market
commentary and company announcements.
But there’s so much more you can do with a blog.
Your blog is the perfect platform to host graphics, animations or videos, providing
the ideal platform to then go and share and promote these assets across your social
media, your email campaigns and around the web.
Even if you’re restricted to writing articles, you can interview people around the
business, curate customer feedback from your social channels or start building an
FAQs section. If it’s properly organised, your company blog can become a resource
centre for the business and start driving traffic towards the revenue generating sections
of your website.
“26% of internet users look
for more information after
viewing a video ad. 75%
of executives watch
work-related videos on
business websites at
least once a week.”
Digital Sherpa, 25 Amazing Video
Marketing Statistics
3. Embrace content diversity

5. Once you’re producing all this great content
you’re going to need to organise it. Organising
your blog is really important, because it will
help you win more search traffic and improve
useful metrics like dwell time and page views.
You should think about organising your blog
on two levels: the first level is the categories,
which would be like the contents page of a
book. You might have sets of categories for
topic, product group or content type. The
second level is tags. These work more like
a book’s index. Your tags are specific to
what each post is about.
Categories can provide the user with easy
navigation around your blog. You can have
your category list on the side bar and readers
can use it to find content they’re interested in whether they want everything you’ve
done on a particular subject or they just want to see all your videos.
Tags are more dynamic and you’ll create new ones as you cover different topics.
Tags allow you to quickly build hub pages on trending stories, which will often
do really well in search. They’re also great for your readers if they want some
background on what they just read.
“Categorising and tagging
your blog posts is one of
the most important steps
in running a successful blog.
When you fill a filing cabinet,
you organise it in
alphabetical order. Why? It
makes it very easy to find
what you’re looking for.
The same should apply to
your blog.”
Trent Paul,
Content Marketing Strategist
at Castleford.
4. Organise your blog posts

6. “Being on Google+ alone is a
potential ranking boost, one
that can sometimes trump all
other factors, including links.”
Danny Sullivan,
Editor at Search Engine Land.
So, you’ve got your brief, your editorial policy
and loads of great content nicely organised
with categories and tags. What else do you
need? How about fame and fortune? That
might be stretching it a bit but you can get
recognition for some of your hard work by
setting up Google+ Authorship.
This is also a great perk for encouraging your
colleagues, customers and suppliers to contribute to your blog. Authorship is very
easy to put in place and when it’s done correctly you’ll see your face and name
alongside your articles in Google search results.
Articles shared on Google+ get indexed almost immediately and there are already
some indications that they do better in search. Over time, it’s very likely that what
is often referred to as “author rank” will become a significant search signal. If you
start building your reputation with lots of quality articles all linked to your Google+
profile now, you’ll see the benefit in long-term.
Castleford Media is Australia and New Zealand’s leading
content marketing business. Set up a demo today to see how
our unrivalled content marketing experience and our unique,
full-scale production set-up help clients build engaging and
effective websites.
5. Google+ Authorship