Sometimes you have to take a break from blogging. For small businesses especially, where priorities extend away from blogging and social media towards more pressing matters that require all hands on deck, this break can spiral into an indefinite hiatus, and the longer it lasts, the more it feels like a struggle to return and write something - anything - to share with your audience.
But rather than continue to procrastinate on posting, let's focus on making the leap forward. If your business is ready to ditch the hiatus and get its blogging groove back, these five tips will help ease you back in with a sense of renewed purpose.
1. Get back to your roots and refresh your focus
If you don't know what to blog about, go back to basics.
When you started the company blog, what was your mission? Did you blog to provide expert advice? Shine a spotlight on guest bloggers who could share their success stories? Highlight partnerships or special promotions? Maybe you were just writing to share how passionate you were about your industry (which tends to be the foundation behind every great blog).
Channel that original enthusiasm and circle back with your blogging strategy. Keep the core elements that your readers know to expect when visiting your blog, but refresh the topics and ideas you write about to keep content thoughtful, unique, and engaging for everyone.
2. Analyze your past performance
You can continue to do more of the same or you can consult Google Analytics to see which of your posts drove the most clicks and traffic to your blog. Check in with your newsletters and track the number of clicks to see what kind of content resonates with readers, as well as what subject headers receive the most opens. Your past performance ultimately influences your upcoming features.
Who knows, you might even wind up creating an entire series based off of one idea you never knew did as well as it did.
3. Establish a realistic editorial calendar
You might have a lot of big goals when returning to your blog, but don't try to cram them all in the first month. Revamp your editorial calendar instead so that the goals are attainable - if you know you can only blog twice a week, blog twice a week.
Ease yourself in little by little and break up bigger goals into smaller steps you can take to reach them one day at a time.
4. Don't write, do research
While sharing your experience is always welcome in a blog post, one simple and effective way to put some meat on your blog's bones is to add in and link to relevant statistics and quotes from other credible experts. By attributing this kind of sourced data, you're able to add expert authority to the overall post and increase your blog's content quality - two aspects that will have your readers continuing to come back for more.
5. Actively engage with people
Respond to comments, track relevant hashtags to find and follow inspiring new influencers, join a Twitter chat, leave comments on other blog posts, and reply back to any and all emails you receive.
Comments are the new likes - when a reader leaves one, it shows that they took the time to read through the post and reflect on it with their own thoughts, which is a huge deal, given that it's much easier to like or favorite a post.
By responding to those comments you're showing that you're listening to what your readers have to say and you care that they took the time to write you.