Your blog should:
- Add value. Your blog should contain content that your target audience wants to read. Entertain them, educate them, share news, or do a little of all three. Just remember that it’s not about you, it’s about your customers and their wants and needs.
- Have clear goals. What do you want to get out of blogging? Ideally, you should be focused on bringing readers in through search engines and social media, building a relationship with them, and then eventually driving sales.
- Build upon your brand. Blogs can be used to not only support your brand, but to help establish it. Blogging gives you a voice and you can harness storytelling to connect with users and make your brand stand out.
- Be consistent. If you can only put out one post a month, that’s okay. Just make sure that you’re making time to hit that once-a-month mark regularly.
Your blog should not:
- Read like an over-hyped sales pitch. People have come to your site to look at your products. If they want more information on what you sell, they’ll head to your product pages, not your blog (though your blog posts can direct them there).
- Consist only of product photos. It doesn’t matter how sought-after your products are, you shouldn’t just have blog posts comprised of nothing but images. Even the most popular photography bloggers—whose images are the obvious focus—will often complement their photos with written storytelling to establish context and create an emotional connection.
- Look random and disorganized. Diversity in what you publish can help you attract multiple types of readers, but it should all fit under the umbrella where your products and your audience’s needs overlap. Everything should feel connected to your brand and organized into categories that you consistently contribute to.
