In school marketing, a blog can be a powerful tool to help you gain the trust of your prospects and convert more enrolments. But like any other marketing tool, you must know how to wield it properly to fully enjoy its benefits. If you have a school blog that is well-curated, neatly designed, and properly promoted, there is a bigger chance you will get more readers and followers in no time.
Here are the five essential ways to quickly gain followers for your school blog:
Get the basics down pat
Before proceeding to the other steps, you must first get your blogging essentials right and make your content look professional and reliable. Here is a simple checklist for your school blog:
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- Are your blog entries thoroughly proofread?
- Do you release blog entries consistently and regularly?
- Does your blog have share buttons and calls to action?
- Are your website navigation and blog entry links working properly
- Do you have an ‘About’ page to tell your prospects what your school blog is about?
- Do your blog entries consistently follow a style guide? It is imperative for you to develop and strictly follow a blogging content calendar. It can help you release blog entries regularly and more frequently, enable you to diversify your content, and see the overall picture of your blog topics.
Know your audience well
Having a decent school blog is not enough – in order to gain a significant following, you must learn how to connect and engage with your prospects. You must be able to pinpoint the kind of people who will read your blog, and why they want to read them. In order to do this, you must keep track of your blog entry performance through analytics. You can use it to determine which blog entries get read frequently, what topics get the most attention, and which writing format or styles appeal the most. By using analytical data instead of personal hunches, you can adjust your writing style to get your blog entries read and shared more often.
Make your content relevant
Once you understand what your prospects are looking for, you can focus on content that can grab their interest. Aside from relevant topics, you can capitalise on trending topics and realign your blog to them. If you regularly maintain a blog that has relevant content for your prospects, you will become an authority of that particular content over time.
Take advantage of SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is very useful if you want to get the attention of prospects who have inquiries that you may answer. A considerable amount of blog visits come from web browser searches, so you need to optimise your blog in order to catch them. For years, online marketers have optimised their content by capitalising on long-tail keywords, which are phrases that can be found by Google during web searches. However, this will soon change as Google has changed its search algorithm and has instead focused on topic clusters.
Here are two ways how to optimise your blog:
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- Prepare a chart that will help you determine your pillar pages, which will provide the broad overview of your content, as well as topics that will revolve around your pillar pages and interconnect with other topics. Work on developing blog content that will give shape to your pillar pages.
- Keywords will still play a role for some time in Google’s SEO, so you will need to identify the long-tail keywords that you can use and insert in your blog’s components, particularly in the headline, body text, meta tags, social tags, and images.
Step on the social domain
Once you determine which of your blog entries get the most attention from your prospects, you can use social media to highlight your blog. It’s a fantastic vehicle when it comes to catching the attention of your prospects and enabling them to share your content to their peers. To make this work, you must again understand who your prospects are and how they move around the social media space – timing is the key in order for your blogs to get seen. Additionally, you must be able to tailor-fit your social posts in order to get more attention in your prospects’ news feeds.
Here are some tips on how you can make your blog promotions work in social media:
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- Always aim for your blog prospects when writing and sharing posts
- Use scheduling tools like Hootsuite so that you can have a regular stream of well-timed posts
- Check your social media analytics regularly to see if you’re reaching out to your prospects
- Become more engaged with your prospects through the comments section
- Spot the social media influencers form your prospects and engage with them so that they can help you share your content.
In order to work on these steps, consistency is the key. School marketing, including writing blogs, should not be treated as a sprinting contest, but rather as an endless marathon. Make sure that you maintain your blog and blog promotions properly in order to see its benefits in the long run.
