Blogging is one of those tasks that can be done quickly, easily and in a flurry of creative outpour. Blogging for your school effectively, however, involves a bit more than relying on your raw skill and simply writing automatically on a theme.
Managing your school’s blog can be difficult, as it involves tactical and strategic insight in order to achieve your desired result – generating inbound leads for your school. Here are some essential school blogging tools to make your job easier.
Organisation
The more organised you are, the better you will write when the time comes. Being prepared with an arsenal of apps, tool and even pens and paper can help to coax out your inspiration. If you are the type of person to come up with ideas as you walk around during the day, Microsoft OneNote is a powerful tool that will enable you to record ideas and file them away for you to search for at your convenience.
Further, make sure that you develop a well thought out content calendar. Just as bodybuilders have meal preparation/plans, you should have your content calendar. Structure your posts so that they have a logical progression of ideas and deliver the content that your school wants to deliver at the appropriate time. This will prevent you scrapping for that Uber Eats menu when you should have consulted your meal plan! A content calendar is the blogger’s way to build a mass of considered, relevant and creative content.
Writing
The AdWords Keyword Planner is a phenomenal tool that helps you to build content that is findable. Even if you don’t like writing, blogging can still be right for you. The Dragon Dictation application will help you breathe fiery hot profundity into your content, allowing you to speak your mind and write at the same time. Also, don’t forget that you can add video or audio to your blog, as mixing up the content media keeps your blog fresh.
Visuals
For the maybe-twenty people who don’t know already, Shutterstock is a great royalty-free library of millions of stock images ready for you to feature in your blog. Remember that a picture takes up valuable real estate on your page, so make sure you choose one that is relevant to your topic. If you want to flex your visual arts muscle, Canva is a service that gets you building your own images.
Analytics
There are plenty of tools that are good for tracking blog effectiveness.
- Google Analytics – just sign up and you’ll be provided with a tracking code that can be placed in your page’s header.
- Momently – easy to understand data; actionable and great for content analytics.
- Crazy Egg – heat-map web stats for your page.
- Enquisite – free, in-depth web stats.
Effective management and curation of your content is the way to make your blogging feel a lot less like work.
