You built your community and people are engaged. So exciting! You still need outreach marketing — one of the best ways is to publish helpful, relevant content on your blog.
What Should I Write About?
When faced with the blank page in Google Docs the question we ask ourselves is “what should I write about?” The next question is usually something like, “does anyone need another blog post about x?” The answer is yes.
No one writes the way you do. Your brand, your product, and the community around it are important. If you have a cycle shop, you still need to sell bikes. Your nonprofit still needs volunteers and donations. Your craft guild still needs advertisers.
Take questions posted in community and use them as topics for your articles. If one person asks the question, three others have the same question. Write about your products. Write about your process, your vision, your why. Heck! Write about your community. Who is the newest member? Why are they crafting? What drives them to create. The topics are endless.
Who Will Do the Writing?
Ideally, your brand is large enough to have a marketing person on staff. Your marketing manager may write or outsource to a copywriter. Stay away from syndicated writing services, though. It won’t help your SEO if the same article is all over the internet like a pandemic. (Too soon?) There are always freelance bloggers who love to write. You may even have someone on staff who loves writing and you didn’t know it. Don’t forget about your community VIPs. Ask, ask, and ask.
One of the ways to highlight and reward VIPs in your community is allowing them to write articles for your blog. When the article is published, post a link in your community and tag them. They’ll share it outside of the community, too. Everyone has influence. Everyone has a voice. Cultivate and reward your community members and your community will become sustainable.
How Often Should I Publish?
The question of how often you should publish on your blog is a factor of your resources (staff and budget) and the desired effect (growth and SEO). Once a week is a healthy publishing schedule. Four times a week is aggressive but effective for a year, if you want to build up content library.
How often you publish should be this: consistently. If you can only write twelve articles, then publish the first Tuesday of every month. If once a week gives you a tension headache, then aim for once every other week. Schedule the posts (WordPress is so good for this) and let them hit the internet on a consistent basis. Consistency is more important for people and search bots than frequency.
Keep Them Coming
When you publish articles on your site, you are nurturing current community members as well as attracting new ones. You have all the tools you need to engage your community. Build your community your way with PeepSo. You’ll thank us later.
