The difference between a good blog and a great blog? Using a blog editor. Here’s why:
We all know that blogging is an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. It can drive traffic to your website, build trust and likeability with your customers, establish you as a thought-leader in your industry, and make your business more searchable in search engines. But just as a well-polished blog can help boost your business, a poorly-written blog can drive people away.
The posts you publish are a reflection of your values, your brand, and your identity as a business. For better or worse, the things you write there can and will have a significant impact on your reputation. If your posts are riddled with errors, poorly thought out and lacking professionalism, customers might assume that’s how you run your business as well. On the other hand, a polished, cohesive blog says to your customers that you care about quality and have well-informed ideas about your industry.
So how do you ensure your blog is helping, not hurting, your business? The answer is in the power of the editing eye.Whether you hire someone to edit your blog for you or take on the task yourself, rest assured, your blog needs an editor. Even a well-written blog needs some fine-tuning to maximize its impact on your audience. The fact of the matter is, editing your blog posts is the only way to guarantee that the posts you’re publishing are engaging to your readers, free of errors, and consistent with your brand voice. All of which, are the makings of a more effective blog.
Reason 1: A Blog Editor Helps Create a More Engaging Blog
The goal of most content marketing strategies is to drive traffic to a business’s website and, ultimately, turn readers into customers. And while content alone may very well bring new visitors to your website, if that content isn’t informative or engaging, chances are those visitors won’t stick around for long. People want to read content that has value. A takeaway message, if you will. This is where many blogs fall short. They fail to engage the reader.
Editing your blog posts for engaging content can often be as simple as tying together a few loose ends or adding greater depth to certain ideas. Writers don’t always know what message you’re trying to convey to your audience or may simply lack the breadth of knowledge to convey it properly. An editor with a better understanding of your industry and your business can provide a greater level of insight that will make your blog more cohesive, more interesting and more valuable to your reader.
Reason 2: A Blog Editor Will Catch and Correct Errors
Having someone edit your blog also ensures that errors are caught and corrected before the post goes live. No matter how wonderful or prolific a writer is, mistakes are bound to happen. Writers, like everyone else, are human after all. Fortunately, run-on sentences, grammatical errors, and misspellings are some of the easiest things to fix. However, those errors are also some of the most glaringly off-putting things your readers will see. At one point or another, we’ve all started reading a blog post, only to stop halfway through and wonder whether the business that posted the blog had read it at all before they clicked ‘publish’.
Editing for things like punctuation, grammar, and spelling can be tedious, but it will greatly improve the quality of your blogs. One or two mistakes may be fine. Heck, your reader may not even notice. Any more than that, and you run the risk of your blog just looking sloppy. This is not the kind of impact you want to make on prospective clients.
Reason 3: A Blog Editor Helps Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice
Lastly, editing your blog helps maintain consistency in your brand voice. Your brand voice isn’t what you say, but rather how you say it. It has to do with the words you use, and the rhythm, pace, and tone of your prose. Explaining those things to a writer isn’t always easy, and they may not always get it quite right. But, the voice of your brand is the glue that ties all of your content together. Without it, your messages lack cohesiveness and a strong point of view.
Like it or not, if you want to create a truly effective and engaging blog, you need an editor. Where writers provide the substance and framework of a blog post, an editor makes it sparkle. They not only make sure the content itself is sound and free of errors, but they make the small, but important stylistic changes that give your business blog its distinct personality and make it engaging for your readers.
