Photo Credits: Daniel Thomas from Unsplash
Welcome to our blog, friend! As a speaker in the 2021 AANP Convention, I wanted to take my 4 blogging tips from my presentation and share them here for the Jelly community to enjoy!
1. Identifying Your Voice
How can you begin to write if you don’t know how your brand speaks? You need to identify your brand voice before anything else which will make more than just writing easier for you.
Start by asking yourself who the blog is targeting and why you are writing them. Are you using blogs to share updates with community members, writing personal opinion pieces to join global conversations with your reach, or something completely different?
Next, choose the words you want to associate with your brand. Are you light-hearted and humorous, or serious and informative? There are numerous lists of adjectives that you can use for your brand that exist online, so have a look and strengthen your brand identity and humanize your brand.
Lastly, stay true to your values. Stay authentic to what you believe in and don’t compromise your values for what you think is popular. Your brand’s identity and voice should be meaningful to you, don’t expect results from copying a successful brand because I can confidently say that us millennials have a good eye for identifying when a brand is being fake and is pandering.
2. Understanding Your Goals
How can you create content without having a plan? You must understand your reason for creating blog content as well as what you want it to accomplish before you can begin writing.
Similarly to the section on identifying your voice, you need to determine what these blogs will accomplish; are they meant to inform, enlighten, update, or connect? This will dramatically shape how you write and the content you include around it while making it easier to create schedules and set expectations for what you want out of your blog.
Additionally, using the S.M.A.R.T method (detailed explanation here) of goal-setting will help you quantify your successes and make improvements. You don’t want to say “I want this blog to be successful” because that is a general and unmeasurable goal, among other things. Instead say, “I want 20 views on a blog for the month of July” since you can measure that success and have a specific target to reach.
3. Be Inclusive
How can you post content without ensuring that what you create will be able to be consumed by everyone? Ensure that you consider and eliminate any potential obstacles someone can encounter when trying to enjoy your content.
1. Provide alt text and captions on any meaningful images you use
2. Avoid fancy fonts that might be difficult to read! Instead, opt for simple and bold fonts
3. Carefully consider the colours you use and keep high contrast when overlaying colours
4. Ensure your content is clearly divided and sectioned, respecting the font size hierarchy
5. Write in ways everyone can understand; remove local slangs and do not use acronyms without explaining them
6. Balance your image and text usage; too much or too little can negatively impact the viewer experience
4. Search Engine Optimization
How can you get eyes on your content if you do not understand how the algorithm works? Take the time to understand the basics of S.E.O. to learn tricks to push your content ahead of your competition.
We know that “www” stands for World Wide Web, but how can this help us? Very literally, in fact! Think of the Internet as a spider’s web; when someone searches for something, the spider crawls around the web and creates a thread for every website it visits. “How can capitalize on this,” you might ask? Simply put, links! The more relevant links you include on your page to someone’s search, the more times that spider will visit your page and the more valuable the algorithm will consider you to the person searching. This is why Wikipedia is often one of the top results whenever you search for something, as they have over six million articles full of links!
Don’t Be a Stranger!
If you like what we do and what we stand for, stay a while!
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We hope to see you around, friend! <3
