Ah! Google! “Hey Google, how do I start a blog?” “Blogging is easy. I have found 4,690,000,000 results in 0.61 seconds to help you.” Great. Just great.
You start reading and quickly realize that this is becoming a more difficult task than you might have thought. Every site is telling you to do something different. Give up? No, charge on!
Listen, I get it. I’ve been there before. It can be overwhelming. The good news is that I figured it out. And if I can do it, there’s no reason you can’t either.
I hope that in sharing my experience, it will help you to get out there and get blogging.
Is it really worth it?
The first question many of you are probably asking is “Is it really worth it?” In short, yes. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of blogging.
Inbound marketing is the wave of the future. Incorporating a few inbound strategies to your marketing mix is essential.
Schola Inbound Marketing suggests three main reasons as to why it is indeed worth it to start blogging immediately!
1. Website Traffic Growth
According to Schola, websites “with 51 to 100 web pages generate 48% more traffic than companies with 1 to 50 pages.”
2. More Blogs = More Prospects
Schola draws a correlation between the number of blog posts to the number of lead lead generation. Websites with more than 200 blog posts “generate more than 5 times the leads than those with 10 or fewer.”
3. Permanent Marketing Asset
In short, once you add a blog to your site, it will become another arrow in your online quiver so to speak for years to come. Schola reports that roughly 70% of HubSpot’s monthly web traffic comes from prior months blog posts.
Which platform should I use?
I’m not going to spend much time here because my suggestion is simple. Use whatever platform your school website is built on.
As mentioned above, one of the main benefits of blogging is that it drives traffic to your website. Unless absolutely necessary, do not use an external blogging site. You will get the benefit of new content, but not the added benefit of the boost to your search rankings...considering you search engine optimize each post.
Who is the blog for?
Just as important as the technical components of blogging is understanding who you are writing to. I recommend focusing your blog on current parents, prospective parents, and sometimes grandparents.
Students will not be the main readers of your blog. Focus your student marketing efforts on Instagram and/or maybe Snapchat or TikTok. Creating content for students is important, but your blog is not the place.
Wrap up
Hopefully by now, you see the benefits of adding a blog to your school website. I wholeheartedly believe in the power of blogging. Driving more users to your website is a great way to increase your prospect count and in turn increase your enrollment.
Left wondering what you should blog about? Stay tuned and as we will be, well...blogging...about that soon!
- Chaston
Chaston Hart is a School Marketing Specialist at Gipper. Gipper is a platform that helps high schools create professional visual content for social media - in seconds, on any device, and without needing any design experience.
Learn more @ gogipper.com
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