Content Quality Assurance: Examples of the Good, Bad, Ugly
1. Formatting goes wrong
And Google had picked it up before you noticed.
Oops!
Look at the first organic result. Well done article but the formatting needs a little bit of review. The meta description is talking about the article in an objective way, which is a bit too objective it is actually weird (like a wingman who is standing next to you and says “he’s cool!”)
The author obviously took care of the SEO part, he just needed to be more careful and preview the result.
Don’t forget to review your articles thoroughly before publishing, not only grammar and spelling but also details for SEO such as meta description, title showed in search engine, etc.
2. Case Studies make great posts
Customer spotlight!
Have you ever thought of interviewing one of your satisfied customers for a blog article/ as a case study? It not only increases your credibility as a guaranteed solution provider but also makes great materials for your blog.
Try asking some happy customers for a short interview. It does not take much time and as we all know talking for 10 minutes can produce enough materials for a 2 page blog post, if not more.
For some tips regarding interviewing your customer, jump over to Yariv Rabinovitch‘s blog post on this topic.
3. Infrequent posting
In this case, it shows that you just give up (on blogging).
The last blog post on this page was almost two years ago. And then the blog was abandoned ever since.
Perhaps blogging did not work so well for them, perhaps there was not enough manpower. We can only guess. But the customers might think that the software has stopped developed or worse: the company did not continue taking care of their customers/ readers. They should have just closed the blog altogether.
How to avoid this?
We have written another blog post on how to schedule your blog writing and publishing processes effortlessly using Trello, find it here.
4. Option to share
Always make it easy for your readers to share your content. And try to minimize the number of steps they have to take: one click is best.
Besides putting sharing buttons of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin on your blog page, you can give an option to tweet directly tweetable quotes in the blog post.
Below is a perfect example. The author has made it clear and easy to tweet out the quote including via @ and shortened url of the blog post so readers can just do it in one click.
5. Text suffocation
Will you read something like this?
No it is not a journal article even though the text density and the amount of statistics they try to stuff in look exactly something one would read to write up their thesis.
Even the formatting looks too tiring for the eyes to skim.
Remember, presentation is key. Make the format scannable and clear for your busy readers.
Putting in some images (at least once per post, says Neil Patel) makes the blog post more illustrative. Especially if people share it on Facebook, it must have a picture.
I’m sure the above blog post probably has a lot of values to readers but the way it is presented will likely chase the readers away.
6. Infographics are great
For whom too busy to craft high quality content required lots of research and dedication. The shortcut is to hire an illustrator to do an infographic for your blog.
This is truly the 80/20 strategy to blogging.
20% is the efforts of putting some statistics, quick facts and tips together. Then have someone crafting up a nice piece of graphic and boom! you get a high ROI blog post that will usually get shared and linked up many times (if you nail it).
80% result is the popularity you get with all the backlinks from other side in the same niche, or even broader if your infographic covers a general topic in the industry.
So now you’ve seen some cases of good and bad content marketing, go ahead and check your blog again to see if you’ve been making any of these mistakes.
And for your next blog post, try infographic and use our content production and scheduling system for successful blogging in the long run.
Have fun blogging!
Originally published at www.maerketing.com on May 26, 2015.
