There are so many factors that contribute to a successful school blog. Aside from producing well-written posts and efficiently promoting them to maximize their reach, you also need to update it regularly. You’ll encounter difficulties in balancing between writing unique and relevant topics while racing to meet your deadlines to publish them. Quality will suffer when you rush your posts, but also failing to meet your schedules can hurt your consistency.

So, is there a secret formula for maintaining your school blog’s quality and efficiency? Are there proper procedures to follow in keeping your readers’ interests in your content?

Yes, there are best practices that you can follow, which focus on discipline and principles. In my years of promoting school inbound marketing, I’ve learned that setting a good foundation around these principles can help you set a workflow that ensures an efficient, high-quality blog.

Here are 7 blogging principles that can help you maintain and grow your school’s blog:

1. Just Keep Writing

There’s a saying that if you keep doing something over long periods of time, you’re bound to get good at it. Fortunately, writing is a specific activity that benefits from continuous effort and constant practice.

This couldn’t be truer for blog writers. Blogs demand a steady stream of content from its writers. Blogs are the medium to which your school talks with your website visitors and subscribers.

By keeping a constant conversation going with your audience, you gain their trust for your school. Using the words “you” and “I” can take that trust and establish a deeper connection with your audience, thereby giving you more chances of converting them.

Initially, if you want your content to be noticed, it has to stand out. With over 2 million blog posts published daily, you have a minimal chance of being read unless you write something exceptional.

We’ve previously discussed the elements that build an effective blog post. We’ve also pointed out how to write quality content. Now, how do you stand out in a veritable sea of blogs? How do you write it so that it deserves attention?

While there is no single element that can launch your post above all others, you can always add more information in your posts. Increase your word count and content, include more facts or a different approach to a topic.

Writing informally is also a favored style that disarms your audience and captures their attention. Presenting your topic like a thesis or in a formal voice may alienate your readers. You want to keep the conversation easily relatable and understandable. Adding a personal story or anecdote is a perfect opening as well.

You can also include visuals like infographics and video, which have been proven to attract more attention than an article composed of mere walls of text.

Finally, nothing attracts an audience more than by reading about something they can learn from. As you write your blog, share tips, secrets, how-to’s, and even insider information. Mention this at the start of your post as a hook to draw your readers’ interest.

2. Constant Visibility

When you create your school’s blog, you have to commit your time and resources to keep it updated on a regular, sustainable basis. A blog relies on a continuous flow of information to stay relevant.

When you’re blogging on a constant, continuous pace, you keep generating traffic for your school’s blog. By having a planned number of posts that publish on specific days of the week, you can manage your writing hours and meet your audience’s expectations as well.

Not only does this generate traffic, but it also builds credibility and trust. In contrast, posting erratically disrupts the flow of traffic and you may experience a decrease that will be difficult to recover from.

Creating visibility on your blog also means that you have to publish your high-quality posts in greater quantities. Content marketing can’t easily be predicted to succeed with just one post. Instead, create several posts to increase your chances of success.

3. Promote Using Several Platforms

When you promote your school blog, how many channels do you use? Are you just choosing between Hubspot, your blog platform, and Facebook?

You will be severely limiting your chances of being read if you don’t take advantage of the numerous channels available online. There’s still Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram, to name a few more. You should consider what social media sites your audience prefers. You should also consider what your competition uses as well.

Take note that each channel is an opportunity for you to repurpose your content and have your presence be seen throughout different platforms. The more platforms that you have means more traffic for your blog to be seen in.

When you create posts on these platforms, always remember to link back to your website to maximize all the traffic that you’re channelling.

4. Format Your Content To Be Portable

Since everybody is out on the move with their gadgets these days, make sure that the content your produce is both mobile and portable.

What I mean by mobile is that your content should be accessible and be easy to read on mobile devices. Don’t expect your audience to always be at home, in front of their desktop computers. They’re most probably outside, using a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone.

Most of the marketing tools can format your content to fit in any type of mobile device. You can test and perform previews of your content in any format before you publish. You just have to make it a habit to do so.

To make your content portable, write it so that it’s easier to be understood and absorbed by people who are on the move. Expect them to have shorter attention spans who can be turned off by long walls of text.

Think of what activity they’re currently doing – they may be commuting, sitting at a restaurant, or browsing through their mobile phone while waiting for their food. For people like these, having your content in the form of an image, a video or an audio recording such as a podcast, which is more palatable and easier to digest.

5. Make Them Come Back

As you attract new visitors with your blog posts, make sure you get to collect their contact details as well. Make full use of the results of your Call-To-Action efforts, which should be in the form of email lists.

Send out an email blast to each of your subscribers each time you have a new post. This is the best way to lead them back to your blog again. These returning visitors are more likely to share your content, especially on social media channels.

If they keep liking your content enough, that means you’ve earned their trust and you may be assured that they’ll convert into your customers in no time.

Remember, if you have good content, ask your subscribers to come back and read it. They’re less likely to come back on their own.

6. Old Content

As you keep writing new posts and adding to new content to your blog, always keep track of your old content. It may get outdated, but a good quality post should be updated to keep it fresh. If you have hundreds of old posts, that’s a good repository of content for reference that you can back-link to, to improve your SEO chances.

This is especially true for evergreen content, which is timeless and can be re-posted at opportune instances. It can also generate steady traffic of visitors over a period of time.

You can always repurpose your old content by preparing it for specific channels and other mediums. You should have a list ready on what platforms you’ll be converting to, with some media taking priority over others. Make this part of your routine after you’ve finished writing your new blog post.

Outdated content can hurt your blog traffic as your readers can be put off by it, label it as useless information, and bounce away from your site. This can have adverse effects on your metrics, and in your school blog’s credibility.

Consider your old content as equally important resources as your new posts and you’ll eventually realize the benefits in your SEO rankings as well as being a trusted resource.

7. Always Be Searchable

Blogs are an online medium. They rely on embedded keywords to be both searchable and relevant. Achieving SEO rank means you have good content that contains keywords to make your post easier to be seen on searches.

Do your research on basic keywords prior to writing your blog post. There are several keyword search tools online where you type in the keywords that are relevant to your topic and will provide you with a list of similar phrases that are popular.

Incorporating the results of your search into your blog post content will yield to better search results in your favor.

Conclusion

Whether you’ve just started a blog for your school or it has been established for a while now, these blogging principles will help you create a solid foundation on running your blog.

These principles may seem like the basic approach to how you write, format, and promote your blog content, but there are still a number of blog writers who may not have fully engaged in these concepts.

If you have identified with these principles, have you been able to apply them in your procedures in writing for and maintaining your school blog? Have you achieved success by converting your audience into your customers?

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