We thank you for reading our blog, and we hope to provide relevant, timely, and interesting material for you for 2012. Producing a timely and engaging blog (at least we hope so!) requires some effort. But the opportunities and results they can produce are well worth the investment. If your nonprofit organization has a blog, you want to ensure regular production of high-quality. And if it doesn’t, you’re missing great opportunities to tell your stories, to turn your passive followers into active volunteers and donors, and to benefit from the multiplier effects of readers sharing, tweeting, and faving your nonprofit’s good work.
Plenty of advice about how to raise your blog’s readership exists in the same blogosphere your organization is already working in. A recent post by Jeff Ogden at SocialMediaToday.com particularly caught our eye because he keeps the advice clear and simple and because he stresses quality over quantity. And let’s face it: the internet largely encourages the latter over the former. So what is on his short list?
Here is Jeff’s list, then we’ll look at a couple of the details:
- Turn existing customers into readers
- Skip the misleading traffic-boosting techniques
- Speak to a specific audience
- Guest post and use guest bloggers
- Encourage loyalty through consistency
- Be timely and relevant
What the list stresses as its theme is the fact that quality sustained contact might not be as intoxicating as the occasional viral video or post, but solid growth and engaged readership pays the largest return on investment of keeping up your organization’s blog in the first place. “Ironically, the hit-based nature of social media means many blog owners have difficulty cultivating long-term loyalty from their users. It’s easy to get excited when the occasional “viral” post brings in a spike of traffic. But often that traffic melts away as quickly as it arrived.”
People will follow a consistently well-written and informative blogWhether the MKCREATIVEmedia Blog attains these standards or not we leave to our readers – though we’d love to hear your reactions, advice, complaints… in the comment section below! But we want to stress a couple that we have found especially useful and (judging by our analytics) successful. One, the strive for consistency. I follow one or two ‘slow bloggers’ who post long stories every few months, and I do love their rich stories. But they are analysts and artists, not businesses or nonprofits. Their posts are something of an ‘event’ for their followers, but they get that following from other, consistent, production and outreach. A consistent schedule of posting, even if it varies a bit to keep things interesting for readers and writers alike, develops anticipation and loyalty – not unlike waiting for the extended Arts section of your local paper on Thursdays.
The other is speaking to a specific audience. Our blog strives to cover about a dozen topics we believe relevant to the nonprofit and small-business communities we work with and work for. But our expertise is to work through the network of experts in the MKCREATIVEmedia network to develop specific topics. Of course, engaging guest bloggers like Don Akchin and Scott Caldarelli really helps that cause. We learned early in our efforts on this blog that being all things to all people really means you can’t bring meaningful insight to much of anything – and readers knew it.
Finally, skip the misleading traffic-boosting techniques. I was engaged with The Huffington Post during its early years, and quite enjoyed its colorful reporting and news aggregation. But I’ve stopped following most of their sections via Twitter as I get so many open-ended and titillating headlines that often tend to the misleading. The stories are often still important, but deciding whether to click on a tweeted title now feels for me like a game of Russian Roulette – not a feeling a nonprofit wants to engender in its readership!
Check out Jeff Ogden’s advice. Please comment on how you think our blog reaches those standards – or not (especially if ‘not’!). And talk with your colleagues about how to ensure your business’s blog is growing the readership it wants to grow.
