OK, I admit it: Finance blog content can be a little tough to keep engaging long term. Absent of major news or industry information, it’s easy to let your content get a little static. There might be hope in the form of either taking your blog in a totally new direction or split-testing several blog styles to determine how to best communicate with your ideal customer or client.
Already have a successful finance blog? Have a look at the ideas below anyway. There’s nothing wrong with diversifying your messaging to reach a new market or two, is there?
Start a Personal Finance Blog
This is one option that allows you to keep content fresh and appeal to a few specific middle-class demographics. Personal finance blogs typically revolve around ways to save money and are aimed at people who are trying to deflate their cost of living a little. The best ones are those that present a unique angle on the topics of saving and investing.
This kind of blog is also easy to monetize so it can generate money both in new business and ad revenue. So, what kinds of topics would fit well in this kind of blog? Here are a few ideas:
• Energy Efficiency and Conservation at Home
• Effective Home Budgeting Strategies
• Using Your Home’s Equity to Finance Early Retirement
Start an Executive Blog
Does your company target a specific industry? Why not speak directly to the people who make all the big decisions about company direction and start an executive blog just for them? Focus on topics that matter to high-ranking execs, but also take the opportunity to provide content that reflects their means and tastes. Not sure what I mean? Check out the Robb Report if you haven’t already. That is the type of supplemental content that can keep engagement on an executive blog high.
The goal here is to not just barrage your audience with stuffy industry content, but provide them with fun reasons to keep reading new posts. Don’t be afraid to have some fun with this. When you look at your metrics, it’ll become clear how much your readers appreciate content that isn’t all facts and figures.
Start a Curated Content Blog
Are your best words usually someone else’s words? We get that and so do plenty of other very successful bloggers. How effective is content curation? Just ask DMZ, Buzzfeed, or the Huffington Post. They have it down to a science.
There are two very important elements to curating content: credible, relevant, and vetted source material and the support content you run with it. That last bit is where working with professional copywriters becomes a significant consideration.
Bottom line: Content curation is very effective when done right. There are plenty of blogs out there that simply don’t understand or adequately present it. Not sure how to navigate developing a curated content finance blog? Talk to us …
Incorporate Video Prominently
Video is an easy hook for any blog, but in the world of finance, it can be a very welcome diversion. Remember what it was like to see the TV and DVD player roll into the classroom in high school? It’s that kind of pleasant surprise you garner from your audience when you pepper your blog content with video.
You could also select vlogging as your central form of sharable content and develop blog content around it the same way you would for curated content. Develop about 350 unique words minimum to present the content and provide a compelling conclusion with a direct call to action to click through, visit a specific page or channel, etc.
Include Side Content in Your Blog
Your blog is a great way to put more of your content in front of a single audience. You can consolidate various types of content from a range of platforms into a single blog post, facilitating more likes, joins, or connections for all your social channels.
Get into the habit of using your own social media posts and multimedia in the body of your blog posts and make it one-click easy for people to tap to follow, join, etc. Facebook, in particular, makes this very easy to do by allowing you to create a button with a highly focused call to action that generates taps through to landing pages, etc.
Does your company have a podcast? If you don’t have an email and blogging campaign set up around it, you don’t have all the listeners you could, period. It’s time to start thinking about developing that kind of content, too. This also applies if you have a local radio or TV show, even if it doesn’t stream online. Blog posts for each episode can attract more viewers/listeners and an email campaign that directs to every piece of new show content can drastically increase blog traffic.
Final Takeaway
Believe it or not, a finance blog can, and should, be as entertaining as it is informative. It should appeal to your readers in terms of both work and play and should be targeted to the market you are trying to reach. Trying several blog styles or gearing your blog toward several specific audiences can give you a good gauge of reader interest and provide insights into other types of content you should be developing.
Be diligent in all content creation strategies and integrate a diversity of content into your own blog. Need help with your blog or any other finance copywriting project? BeezContent is here to help. Contact us today and talk to us about all your finance content creation needs.
