Your company blog contains the most forward-facing content you are likely to produce.  Your blog will also account for a large percentage of your organic traffic as well as visits from social media, provided you are consistently posting enough content.  Here are ten tips to make your blog content more engaging.

Know Your Audience

Knowing you audience is important in any aspect of marketing or sales and your company blog is no different. Understanding psychographics and demographics will go a long way toward helping you craft more targeted content. This begins with buyer persona development in the initial stages and throughout the implementation of your inbound marketing plan.

Use Video

“The sum of all forms of IP video, which includes Internet video, IP VoD, video files exchanged through file sharing, video-streamed gaming, and video conferencing, will continue to be in the range of 80 to 90 percent of total IP traffic. Globally, IP video traffic will account for 82 percent of traffic by 2022.”  These numbers speak for themselves. People consume video at a much higher rate than written text. While written blogs will always be viable, mixing in video is a must.

Invite Guest Bloggers

Inviting guest bloggers can help keep your company blog fresh and introduce your blog to an entirely new audience. With guest blogs, comes backlinks and a host of new people to share your content through social channels. The more eyes you have on your content, the more engagement you are likely to receive.

Employ A Diverse Group Of Writers

Much like a newspaper or magazine, your company blog needs a variety of perspectives.  Different writers will have their own point of view, writing style, as well as their own area of expertise. While you may have a couple primary writers who handle the bulk of your content, you’ll want to have a few others that contribute periodically.

Write In The First Person

Building a relationship and connection with your readers is the goal of any piece of writing.  Speaking in the first person helps you to directly relate to your audience and causes that all important “feeling” from your articles. This makes your writing memorable and increases the chance that people will read your piece in its entirety.

Tell A Story

A story makes you, your company and your writing more relatable and memorable. Storytelling is not a new concept and dates back prior to the written word. These types of articles drive customer loyalty and provide educational content in an entertaining form.

Be Personable

Being personable doesn’t mean sharing your personal life with your audience, it simply means coming across as open minded and approachable. This can be achieved by writing conversationally, using shorter sentence and simple language. This will help you to avoid sounding like a know it all and make your audience more likely to engage with your content.

Take Risks

Taking risks is an important part of business in general and a necessary ingredient in creating outstanding content. While you want to be careful not to offend, you do want to play a bit on the edge of what is acceptable. This can be done using humor, refuting an established idea or simply writing about something outside of the norm for your industry.

Make Fun Of Yourself

Using humor involves risk. To mitigate that risk, you can always just make fun of yourself. This can make you more likable and add some flair to your writing without upsetting the masses. Pointing out previous work-related blunders or something in your personal life that relates to your line of business is a sure way to keep your readers entertained.

Leverage Newsjacking

When using this technique, it is best to avoid sensitive subjects and focus more on humor and entertainment. Sporting events, inspiring news stories and movie premieres make for great opportunities to piggyback on a trending subject or hashtag. One of the most famous examples of newsjacking is the post-Super Bowl tradition where players from the winning team exclaim “I’m going to Disney World”. While you may not have the funds to make this happen with celebrities or on national television, the same affect can be achieved by incorporating trending events into social media memes and blog posts.