The following post was initially published on the Content Marketing Institute Blog (October 11, 2011).

“Uh oh,” you may be thinking. “The marketing department is talking about that whole blogging thing again. Last time we did this, it was a disaster. Worse, no one seemed to like my posts.”

Yikes! Stop right there! And think again!

Yes, a lot of corporate blogs are awful. But neither your company’s blog nor the posts you contribute to should bear a sense of impending doom. We spend a lot of time helping clients manage their blogs. This involves bringing together subject matter experts, sales reps, marketing employees, and executives — many of whom have unique ideas but have never written a blog post.

One of the first questions we get from new bloggers is, “What makes a good blog post?“  As we answer, the doom drifts out of the room and is replaced by the glowing light of nurturing leads and increasing sales. Cha-ching!

We thought we’d share our answer with our readers here. 

1. Good blog posts speak to a target audience.

Figure out who is buying what you’re selling and write for them. If your company specializes in building mobile applications, you’re likely selling to executives and marketing departments, not mobile app developers. Your own developers can still write content for your blog, but they should keep content way less technical than it would be if they were writing to their peers.

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Creating content for a company’s social media properties, website, and blog (just to start the list) can be tough–and without a thorough understanding of the company and its audience, it’s hard to get it right. Whether you’re taking on a new client or starting a new job, you need to ask a lot of questions before you dive into creating content. Every business is different, so at Right Source Marketing, we never ask exactly the same questions for each new client, but below are a few of our staples.

Note: even if you’ve been working for a company or with a client for a while, you may realize that you don’t know the answers to these questions, or that the answers have changed since you started. It’s a good idea to reevaluate and periodically ask these questions again, even if you’re just asking yourself.

1. What’s your audience like? Who are these people who buy your stuff? What age, what gender?  Where do they work? Where do they play? What’s important to them personally and professionally? What do they already love about your business? What do they hate about it?

Keep asking questions to get as full a picture of your audience as possible. If no one can answer this question, then you need to do some research (like a survey), or bring someone who would know in the room (like a salesperson).  Knowing details about what makes your audience tick helps you figure out what topics to cover and language to use. We start with this question because all of the other questions and answers should be colored by a focus on audience.

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Improving your skills in email communications improves your content marketing efforts, and vice versa, as an audience member (nonprofit technology consultant Kate Bladow) pointed out after a presentation I gave about writing for the web last week.

I couldn’t agree more. To follow on Kate’s point, here are five best practices to think about when you’re communicating with an audience, whether you’re organizing a team or writing for the company blog.

1. Make everything as easy as possible

Emailing: When I first started at Right Source Marketing, Will Davis gave me some advice to live by: When you can, provide numbered lists in emails, rather than bullets or multiple paragraphs. That way, people you email know exactly what points you’re making, and can respond to each point easily using the numbers you provided.

Content marketing: I’m a huge fan of writing blog posts in formats like this. Numbered lists and sections make blog posts easier for you to write and easier for your audience to digest. Always think about using the format that makes things easiest for your audience and yourself.

2. Ask for action

Emailing: I always try to include clear action steps in emails rather than open ended questions or suggestions. Specifying actions from the start means you’re less likely to need to re-initiate conversation on the same topic, saving everyone time.

Content marketing: Decide what action you want your readers to take, and ask for that action. You could ask readers to comment on your post, follow your company on Twitter or sign up for a product demo. Ask in a clear and confident way just as you would when writing to your coworkers.

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The following post was initially published on the Content Marketing Institute Blog (June 30, 2011).

All content marketers can learn from what Yoda said to a young Anakin Skywalker: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” This very same destructive sequence, which turned Anakin into Darth Vader, all too frequently derails content marketing efforts.

Why? Because, horror of horrors, content marketing involves a large amount of writing, and for many people, writing is terrifying (they may say they hate writing, but thanks to Yoda, we know they’re just scared). Even worse, someone has to gingerly edit that writing without hurting psyches already fragile from the writing struggle. Particularly for content marketing campaigns that involve a lot of blogging, the fear and hatred of writing can cause complete content marketing paralysis.

That way, it does not have to be. To help minimize the fear and suffering in your content marketing—particularly, blogging—efforts, I’ve provided some tips to turn you and your team into writing Jedis:

1. Write first, edit later

Don’t think too hard as you write your first draft, or you’ll be in for a nasty case of writer’s block.Think as if you were in a lightsaber battle. You can’t form your fighting strategy as you slash or you’ll be cut in half. Take the advice in this post into account before you write, and use it to edit your work after you write. Do not let it paralyze you while you write.

2. Focus on a key idea

Your blog posts may not always be intense as a Jedi using the Force, but you must focus on one key idea to catch and hold the attention of your readers. You can make several points as part of one idea, but readers should have a clear idea of what they’re supposed to take away from reading your post.

Now, you may get halfway through writing a post when you realize that your focus is different from the one you intended. That’s fine, and common. When you’re done with your first draft, just go back and make any necessary edits to pivot the whole post toward this new focus. Read the rest of this entry »

Most website design and redesign projects focus on technology and aesthetics to the detriment of an extremely important element: written content. Depending on the website, written content can be more or less prominent, but concise and catchy writing is important whether you have two or twenty lines of copy.

This Monday night, I participated in a lightning round style WordPress Meetup here in Baltimore. With an audience of interactive designers, developers and business people who all use WordPress to build and manage websites, I thought I’d talk about what you need to put on your website after you’ve built it.

My slides are below, but to fill in the gaps, here’s what I covered:

1. Why you should care: I was speaking to an audience of designers and developers, who probably aren’t responsible for writing their clients’ content. But designers and developers need their own websites, and they also need to make sure their clients’ websites are written well enough to help their clients’ business and include in their own portfolios. A website you design or build won’t mean much if there’s nothing on it.

2.  Don’t over-SEO. Too often, I hear people talk about putting content on their website because it will draw search engine traffic. However, that traffic consists of humans—not robots. If humans can’t easily understand your content because it’s a giant mess of keywords, any amount of traffic you generate will be meaningless.

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