Freshen up your blog

It’s just over 6 months since the start of the Webfwd blog, so about time for taking stock and looking at what the blog does. As with any form of marketing, you should be tracking what works and what doesn’t, and whether it meets your original aims. This way you can capitalise on what works well and get rid of or amend what doesn’t perform as well and ensure you’re getting the best ROI. So here are some ideas for ways to freshen up your blog and blog posts.

1. Navigation – once your blog is pretty developed it’s likely (hopefully) that you’ll have lots of interesting posts. Instead of scrolling through all of them or using a clunky search bar, make sure you have categories set so that people can read about things that are interesting and relevant to them.
2. Check your links – make sure that all of the links in your posts are still active, and if they’re broken, change them or get rid of them. It’s bad from a consumer perspective and it’ll damage your SEO.
3. Update – update out-of-date images, statistics and contact details, both for your company/personal profile and in the blog posts. If you amend blog posts, put a little edit information in so people can see it’s been updated.
4. Get a second opinion – find people to test your blog out to see if there are bits that don’t work for them, you won’t always be able to be objective if it’s your own. Are the social share buttons obvious enough, does the comments section work, can they read the text easily?

As well as the structure of the site, make sure that your content is fresh and engaging. Here are our favourite blog post ideas:

• Behind the scenes ; people love to feel like they’re getting something exclusive.
• Top x list; a bit like this one I guess, top 10 infinity pools is always going to perform a bit better than top 10 printer cartridges (well you never know) but they are straightforward posts to write and read.
• Tutorials; people love to know how things work or happened, either just because they’re intrigued or because they want to try to do something themselves.
• Case-studies; examples of people or businesses in similar situations, how they’ve utilised your product or service, how they solved problems etc.
• Comparisons; this is something people will often search for online because they want to work out which product or service best meets their needs. Write a comparison for them to save them research time, and if you sell those products or services then you may be able to convert the reader into a customer.
• Reviews; in a similar way to comparisons, people like to know what other people think of the thing they’re thinking of buying/doing, and over 70% of people look at online reviews before they purchase something. If you write honest reviews that people trust, and perhaps use affiliate schemes then you can also make some money from this.

Does your blog need a refresh and some new content, or have you even set one up yet? If you need help then let us know, we can help find the right solution for you: hello@webfwd.co.uk