Congratulations, you have just set up your school blog and have enough material to cover the entire school year. Now all you need is to make it work for you.
Having a blog is good, but it’s not good enough to drive prospective parents to check out your school website. You must be able to identify and apply strategies to create website traffic and convert your blog readers into customers.
To make your blog function properly as a content marketing tool, you will need to follow these three simple ways to get more readers to your school blog:
Content
Your content must be worth reading – it needs to offer the audience a sense of value gained.
- Captivate your audience with the right headline. The first thing the audience sees before reading your blog is the headline. You want to make sure this grabs attention and makes prospective parents click through and continue reading. Don’t waste time with trial and error – to find out whether your headlines are letting you down, take advantage of tools such as CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.
- Evergreen content will ensure ongoing readership.
If your blog references a specific school musical or sporting event, the content will date, becoming irrelevant to future readers who visit your site. That’s not to say you shouldn’t post such blogs, but if this is the case and your content does date, you might want to consider updating or repurposing it to ensure you are still driving traffic to your blog.
Promotion
Growing your readership base won’t happen if you don’t promote your blog!
- Share your blog on multiple social media platforms on multiple occasions.
You may have heard – organic reach is dying. If you only post your blog once, you will miss out on a large share of the audience. This blog by Kissmetrics has created a sample sharing schedule for you to follow.
- Be found where your audience is looking. If your blog focuses on the benefits of learning an instrument in the early years, there’s no point sharing this on a carpentry forum. Why? Because people who are in search for such information will not visit a carpentry forum for it. Instead, make your presence known within similar communities; be available and accessible when your prospects are looking.
Optimisation
To boost your blog traffic, you need to properly optimise your website for search engines. Yes, this applies to school blogs as well!
I won’t go too deeply into this one, as it’s an entire topic of its own, but your school needs to be on top of SEO, so why not begin by reading through our school marketing blog on SEO.
You won’t get 100,000 views overnight, but following these simple tips will make sure your blog gets noticed.
