5 Reasons Why Nonprofits Should Have a Blog
A blog is a useful social media platform that allows you to communicate directly with your audience. Although blogging requires a sustained effort, it’s one that pays off in many positive ways.
1. Two-Way Communication
A blog shouldn’t only be a one-way communication process but rather a conversation: you communicate with your readers and the readers, in turn, respond to you via a comments box. Audience feedback plays a key role in ensuring you provide exactly what is sought after. Once you become aware of what you are lacking, you are able to work from there to move forward. Favorable feedback helps you realize what your strong points are and what you are doing correctly.
The feedback you receive can also give you ideas on what kind of topics to address in future blog posts that are meaningful to your readers.
2. Nonprofits are on Top of their Game
When you are tending to your blog, you are not just addressing topics that your audience specifically find important, but also topics that are important in the industry as a whole. This means that you, as an organization, have to keep up with current affairs and news updates in order to constantly provide useful topical information. Being on par with what’s happening around you offers you a valuable edge that closely ties in with the next point below.
3. A Sense of Trust
When your blog posts touch on topics that are helpful and useful to your audience, a sense of trust is created. Readers automatically tend to trust a source as soon as their needs are met and questions answered. Maintaining a blog helps you foster a positive relationship that can have many advantages for both the reader and yourself.
4. Social Shares
Do you have your Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus accounts set up yet? Your blog posts are original content that makes an excellent source for social sharing material. Once you have strong followership, sharing blog posts that provide value to readers is a fantastic way to extend your reach and grow your audience.
5. SEO
We’ve previously touched on what you need to know about SEO and we have seen that keywords play an instrumental role in allowing your site to be found more easily through search engines. Producing keyword-rich blog posts is a great way to get your site on the web recognized. There are many useful online keyword tools that should give you a good idea of which keywords are better to use in your blog post.
Wondering how often should you blog? This depends on the nature of the work you do and the topics you address. While some may notice that blogging no less than once a week is an ideal way to keep abreast and meet readers’ expectations, others may see that just a single blog post a month does the trick.