One of the first things you learn when you set about promoting your emerging online business is that you should have a blog in order to get better online visibility and gain an audience. Depending on how much you enjoy creative writing, you’ll be happy or daunted by this notion yet the bottom line remains that regularly posting on a blog can greatly increase your marketing success.
The most relevant questions you may have on the subject have been already answered here:
Common questions about blogging to promote online courses
This article aims at taking things a bit further and showing you some hacks that will help bring your blog to a new level.
5 Blogging hacks for online course creators
The ultimate goal is to be found easier online and direct lots of traffic from your blog posts to the landing page for your online course. Here are five things to keep in mind when working on your blog:
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Focus on quality over quantity
You probably have been told over and over again to post frequently once you start a blog. I’m sure I have advised towards regularity of updates in my articles and while that is sound council, you shouldn’t just post anything for the sake of keeping dates.
People who search online for solutions to their problems and are directed to your blog want to genuinely find answers. They don’t click to be directed to the blog in order to see just how often you have posted in the past month.
If you want to attract new customers, your blog should offer something of value – it’s better to take your time to research a subject and publish a lengthier, more in-depth article once a week than struggle to come up with something every other day.
You can even take this one step further and do a monthly feature of even greater substance – I assure you it will draw more readers, comments and shares over time.
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Include graphics
It’s a visual world, we are all well-aware of this by now. Just look at the number of funny pics, memes or gifs you have visualized in the past two days. Unless you utterly go off the virtual grid, it’s impossible to have escaped them. The reason they are so frequent is that they are freakishly popular with people of all generations.
It’s only logical that you harness this potential and include at least one image. The ‘hack’ I’m suggesting is that you make it a branded one – with the blog post title and your logo included.
You can easily share the graphic on your Pinterest and Instagram accounts to get better visibility and attract more traffic to your blog from there.
There are several ways for you to create branded graphics, from Photoshop or Illustrator to Canva.
Read more: Top 5 photo editing tools for online course creators
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Be yourself
Starting a business is hard work as it is. It’s no small effort to develop new products, find your niche and do all the marketing required to get customers and begin making sales.
FREE White Paper: How to increase your revenue by marketing your online courses
Blog writing may or not be in your ballpark (if you are into instructional design it most probably is) but you should definitely not make it increasingly difficult by using something other than your own voice.
Online blogs are derived from old-fashion diaries and although it’s never a good idea so share all your intimate thoughts online, it’s best if you make your posts personal. Ultimately you want people to know and buy something from you and sincerity works best.
Do not pretend to be something else or try to use language that is not natural to you – you’ll either eventually slip or it will become very tedious.
Read more: 6 Personal branding tips for knowledge entrepreneurs
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Make an archive of your blog posts
It’s a very common mistake to treat blog posts as you would the day’s news – like they are only relevant when they are posted and for a limited time afterwards.
What you should be doing is organize the content in a way that makes it easy for visitors to find all the interesting snippets on your site. If endless scrolling is necessary for people to discover what else might be of interest to them, you are not doing it well enough.
It’s best if you create an archive or a summary page on your site and, of course, add a search button so that anyone can type in keywords to browse already published material.
Limiting your audience to those who happen to come across one of your titles at a certain time is a pity – make it easy for them to access more.
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Have strong URLs
The URL of your article is like a beacon in the immense sea of online content – the brighter it shines, the easier it is for people to see and get to it.
When you name your blog post in WordPress or Squarespace, the URL is set by default to whatever title you give. It doesn’t have to stay that way, though.
Your title and URL can be a little different, and your URL should be intensely focused on a keyword or keyword phrases that indicate what the content of your blog actually is.
Search engines can’t unscramble complicated URLs, they just read them so if you want to be found by those who will find you relevant, be relevant to the search engine first.
Read more: Don’t forget about SEO when creating your online course
Wrapping up
Blogging is currently a great way to get traffic to your product or service page. However, everyone is on to it so you need to stand out. Use these five hacks and you’ll surely come up ahead of the crowd.
