Skip to content

The Best Kind of Blog For Your Brand

By ZAK

Suppose you’re talking to your creative design agency or brand agency about making your website a bit more eye-catching and exciting. In that case, you may already have spoken about visuals, video and a bit of audio too. However, if you want your audience to hang around a little longer on your site, your blog must be up to scratch.

Some Background

While digital natives have fully embraced blogging as if it were their own, it’s generally believed to have been a bit longer than they’ve been. It’s pretty widely accepted that the first blogger was Justin Hall on links.net when he was a student at Swarthmore College in sunny Leeds in 1994.

A few years later, the ubiquitous noun itself popped up in 1999, has morphed from “weblogs” and logging the web and is attributed to programer Peter Merholz. Fast forward to 2004, and the blog becomes Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Today, there are an estimated 440 million blogs worldwide. All the more reason for brands to join in, but equally all the more reason to make their stand out. Here are a few ZAK tips to get you started.

The Killer Headline

No blog post is going to draw readers in without a catchy headline. Yes, the content matters, but your headlines is also essential. It’s imperative you make your headlines short, snappy, funny even and relevant.

Copywriters at your creative design agency can lend a hand. It’s their job, it’s, and their talent. Check out some of ours for Fortnum and Mason, for starters.

The Design

If it’s annoying to read because the design is cluttered, fussy or the copy just jumps around on the page with irritating pop-ups, then readers will turn away from your blog and go elsewhere.

A professional-looking blog designed by your branding agency will reflect your business, its style, look and feel and draw the reader in.

The Content

It’s got to be juicy, relevant to your target audience, and culture driven. It’s also essential to plan your content while adding a little wiggle room for any emerging stories you may want to comment on relevant to your brand.

For example, if you’re a beauty brand, plan your content around relevant and meaningful copy for your customers, including “how-to” topics, emerging trends and so on.

By giving your readers valuable content, they’ll come back for more and have a heightened sense of curiosity about your brand. If you’re short of time, consider outsourcing your blogs to a creative design agency.

How Often?

Google and other search engines prefer blogs (and websites) that offer up fresh content. That doesn’t mean you have to blog every day. Weekly, fortnightly or even monthly is better as long as it’s regular.

If you walk away from your blog and let it gather dust, your site will have fewer visitors and visibility.

Does Size Matter? 

For big-time SEO visibility, you’re looking at 2,000+ words. If you want to educate your audience, go for around 600-1,000 words, whereas if you’re going to offer up something more bite-size to draw people in, head towards 400-600 words. No matter which length, inserting keywords will improve your visibility and search optimisation.

You may want to consider turning your longer posts into a series, so readers don’t have to wade through too much to find what’s relevant to them.

Make it Shareable

Blogs aren’t just someone’s vanity project (or shouldn’t be!); they’re for your audience to read, enjoy and share with their contemporaries. Have share icons so your readers can share to their favourite social platforms, thereby widening your reach and driving traffic to your site.

Check it’s Working

Either you or your creative agency will use Google Analytics to measure your blog’s performance. There’s no point in having a blog if no one is reading it and no one can find it.

Analytics will tell you how people found you, who’s reading your sparkling copy and which kind of topics you’re posting about are the most popular.

Reading to start blogging about your brand? ZAK is a next-generation creative design agency and branding agency, talk to us about your blogging needs, hello@zakagency.com