Blogging is a powerful way to drive search engine traffic to your nonprofit website or online fundraising site. Here are some tips to maximize your online fundraising efforts with blogging.
Topics
When visiting blogs, users are not looking for a stream of promotional material or asks for donations. They want to read informative, relevant information that is interesting and compelling.
The rule of thumb used by many non-profits is 10% promotional and 90% informational or entertaining.
Providing updates regarding your initiatives can be presented in such a way that it’s not promotional, but helps the reader understand how their contribution is helping things they are interested in supporting.
Write for people, not just search engines
Google loves original content that’s updated regularly. While it can be inviting to stuff keywords into your blog posts specifically to attract search engine attention, ultimately, your goal should be to provide content your readers want to read.
And the good news is, recent changes to Google’s search algorithms are rewarding website owners who write good content readers want and penalizing websites that have content specifically created for search engine ranking.
Length
With the increasing popularity of text messaging, Twitter, and other short bursts of communication, people’s attention spans have shortened.
Posts should be long enough to convey your message, and not any longer than they need to be.
Images
Relevant images attract your readers attention.
Care should be taken to ensure your posts don’t infringe on any copyrights and if using royalty-free images, verify the terms of service allow for the usage you’ve planned.
Headline
Your headline may be the most important parts of your blog post.
Your headline should attract the attention of your target audience. Readers are accustomed to skimming. The primary purpose of your headline is to get the reader to read the next sentence.
Make sharing easy
Readers share more often when it’s easy for them to do so.
If they have to figure out how to share something on Facebook or Pinterest or go through a lot of effort to share, they likely won’t.
Blogging can add an additional dynamic to your nonprofit fundraising efforts that can yield great results for you. Just remember, by focusing on your audience, you’ll be rewarded in more ways than you imagined.
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