3 Ways to Make Your Blogging Practices Highly Sustainable
In order to maintain strong engagement and traffic levels, studies have found that branded blogs should post sixteen or more times a month. However, maintaining this frequency while consistently posting high-quality content can be quite a challenge.
Keeping up with the daily demands of an active blog requires the focus of a full-time job, but more often than not, it is simply another addition to the list of an already overwhelmed marketing team that can’t afford a full-time writer.
In order to stay relevant with the market, consistent posting is necessary, and so are maintainable blogging practices that support ongoing growth. Finding the systems that make blog maintenance more sustainable, practical, and achievable can help to support a successful blog in the long run.
Here are three simple steps your marketing team can take to embrace a more sustainable blogging strategy.
Incorporate Greener Practices
The definition of sustainability is “the ability to be maintained over a period of time.” While most people equate going green with reducing, reusing, and recycling, adopting sustainable practices within the marketing team can support a better internal and external environment, too.
By incorporating sustainable practices that are green and environmentally friendly, your business can do its part to ensure that every part of the blogging practice is supportable for the long run. Since blogging is done almost entirely online, eliminating excess paper and materials is a no-brainer. However, there are some other easy ways to make your online power usage more sustainable, too.
Since most small businesses don’t have the budget to switch over to renewable energy on their own, many self-hosted blogs and websites turn to green hosting services as an alternative. This allows multiple web hosting companies to draw from green energy sources like solar and wind power, reducing their carbon footprint and contributing to a sustainable future.
Interestingly enough, adopting green business practices can actually help with growth and success. Sustainable brands grow 30% faster than their competitors, as a third of consumers actively choose to buy from green businesses.
The environment is also important to your employees, too, with nearly 75% of workers agreeing that working for an environmentally-responsible company positively impacts their work experience.
Create a Practical Organizational System
Highly productive bloggers find systems that are simple, easy to follow, and practical so their talent can be used efficiently over and over again. By compartmentalizing their day-to-day into achievable to-do lists and staying highly organized, marketing teams can find a system that works for everyone to encourage sustainable productivity.
Introducing a simple but effective project management system can help marketing teams to stay organized and connected without wasting precious time filling out complicated to-do lists or responding to long email chains. Redbooth is a great PM software tool designed for marketing teams with specific tools and templates. With productivity tools like task delegation, progression tracking, and even mobile integration, blogging projects can be more organized and sustainable. Additionally, teams can save time by keeping calendars, content, and conversations organized in a single location, rather than switching between platforms.
Keeping your entire marketing team organized is essential for a sustainable blog, but the system in place must actually be pragmatic and applicable to the everyday. Designing complex calendars, to-do lists, and organizational systems may work for a time, but it could actually slow things down in the long run. The key to sustainability here is simplicity and practicality.
Make Sure the Blog Fits
Blogging is an essential part of branding, marketing, and building engagement via content. It connects customers to your platform and introduces them to your brand by providing valuable content they can use. However, in order for a healthy blog to be properly maintained, it must fit into the overall marketing strategy to attract the right types of customers.
It is important that bloggers closely monitor target audiences to create content that answers the burning questions or addresses relevant topics in their niche. In order to do this, marketing teams need to dive head-first into audience analytics so that they truly understand who they are writing for.
The audience analysis tool from Crimson Hexagon is a great starting point to understand audiences, identify influencers, and create consumer personas to drive a more targeted strategy. From here, marketers can track trends among targeted audiences for relevant content ideas. The tool even uses AI technology to measure brand sentiment and accurately assess audience reactions to specific topics for a more focused and strategic content campaign.
A brand that posts blog articles just for the sake of posting will not likely bring about sustainable growth. Failing to create targeted and relevant content will only result in an abundance of wasted effort with no results.
A sustainable blog is one that relates to customers by providing them the insight they need and want to see. By keeping a close eye on the interests of your readers and customers, marketing teams can understand the exact types of blogging content that will draw in relevant audiences.
Over to You
Creating a sustainable blog means that every step of the process ensures productivity and success because no time, effort, or energy is wasted. It is important that marketing teams find a system that is practical and maintainable while still keeping the key audience in mind for a content campaign that is sure to bring positive results. If you are a content marketer, let me know what steps you’re taking to make your blog more sustainable in the comments – I’d love to dig deeper and analyze your methods together.
Author Bio
Pratik Dholakiya is the founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. Pratik has spoken at the 80th Annual Conference of the Florida Public Relations Association, Accounting and Finance Show, Singapore, NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, SEMrush Meetup, MICA, IIT-Roorkee, and other major events. As a passionate SEO and content marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge in publications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web, YourStory, and Inc42, to name a few. He can found at Twitter @DholakiyaPratik.