The Blog About Blogging
Content is king. We hear that almost daily in our industry. Blogging is one of the most cost-effective ways to publish unique content to get traffic to your site and help your site rank better. We believe in this so strongly that we started including complementary blogging as part of every SEO campaign we run. It helps our clients get better rankings, more traffic, more leads and ultimately helps us show them the ROI from our efforts.
The industries our clients are a part of run the gamut: technology, finance, legal, medical, real estate, manufacturing. You name it, we’ve worked on it. One recurring question that is frequently asked whenever we’re outlining our responsibilities to a new client is “How do you know enough about our industry to write about it?”
This is an extremely valid question. Nobody knows more about your business and industry than you, but there is a process for how we can write on behalf of your brand and speak as an expert on a wide variety of topics. I’ll kick it over to Maya Devassy, who oversees content strategy here at Fortress to elaborate…
The short and long answer on how to become an expert in any industry and write about it is to research. They say knowledge is power, right? Well in order to gain more knowledge on a specific industry, I research the industry or topic I’m going to write about for hours. It’s amazing what you can learn through search engines—Google is my best friend—blogs and social media. We live in an age where a plethora of information is available at the click of a button. It’s amazing and frightening.
There’s good and bad to living in the information age. The good is you can access all sorts of information about any topic you can think of in an instant, as long as you have internet access and an internet-friendly device—and who doesn’t have that these days? Getting information has literally never been easier. At the same time though, not all information is quality information and anybody can write about anything and call themselves an “expert” on a particular subject.
In the digital age we live in, people are all about the narrative and want to share their opinions on different subjects. That’s fine and dandy, but it’s important not to confuse opinion with fact when researching. Because of this, I make every effort to read content from multiple sources. I make sure to have second, third, fourth and even more sources to back up the original source of information I want to use when writing on a specific topic.
What’s the difference between a 401(k) and an IRA? What is the divorce process in Illinois? Where is the best place to get an MRI? What are “dibs” in Chicago? Good writing on any subject starts with good research, but that’s not the only thing. It also depends on the type of article you’re writing. For example, there’s a different style of writing between an academic article and a blog post. If you’re writing for a blog, it’s more acceptable for the writing to be informal, informational and opinionated. But you still want to make sure to have a balance of fact and outlook.
In the end, the key is to read quality content from all kinds of sources. If you can interview someone in the industry, even better. The research process may be time-consuming, but I haven’t had a client yet say I don’t know what I’m talking about.
