This is a great guest article by Lisa Jones whose own blog was a finalist in the UK Recruiter Blog awards for 2014. She certainly hits the nail on the head with her 10 Commandments for a blog page on your website.
Blogs are great. They let candidates and clients see your company’s specialism and demonstrate how well you know your sector. They can advise your candidates and give them tips so they are easier to place. They can even help attract talent, and if you write them well enough they practically market themselves, leading to you winning clients off the back of them!
However, having the perfect blog isn’t just about having great ideas written well. You have to make sure that your blog page is functional to help people engage with it, and optimised to let your blogs get loads of views and not just sit there gathering dust. The goal of your blog is not to write the copy; it’s to get it read (and ideally subscribed to and shared!)
All too often, when I am running digital strategy discovery sessions for recruiters, I find that they have written (pretty good) blogs, only to find that their format and platform let them down massively.
My 10 commandments for making your blog work for you:
- Have a subscribe button – so many blogs do not. Don’t flatter yourself that your talent and clients will log onto your site every day to check for content.
- Have social sharing buttons (like / comment / share) to ensure that when people view your content they can engage with it
- Have tags and categories. These help people navigate to blogs similar to the one they are taking the time to read.
- Anchor links – keep people engaged by giving them things to do when they’ve read the blog. If the blog is about construction, link too construction jobs, and pages about the construction sector on your own site (anchor them!)
- Follow e-commerce’s lead and serve them – this means if they’ve read your blog, offer them other content (like Amazon) that they’ll like (or rather that you want them to like – Jedi-Mind trick!)
- Have images – Smart phones were built for them! Images increase engagement and ensures that when the content is shared, it is engaging to people in the sharers community. (Make sure that the images you post with your blogs travel to the sites your readers share them to.)
- Ensure that Pinterest likes your images too (see Pinterest blogs). By making your content pinnable you have a great chance of attracting Google surfers to your content.
- Make a clear path to the jobs pages. After all you are blogging to achieve the goal of more engagement and ultimately more relevant job applications.
- Have a clear path to the home page.
- Make sure that your blog has an author page, and that this page links through to the author’s meet the team page and I can get to know the author (and see what else they’ve written).
Do you have these features on your blog page? Do you know of any other features that have helped your company’s blog? Let me know in the comments.
Lisa is a Director of Barclay Jones, a consultancy working with agency recruiters on their recruitment technology and social media strategies. Prior to Barclay Jones she worked in a number of Recruitment, IT, Web and Operations director-level roles. She is a technology and strategy junkie with keen eyes on the business process. You’ll see Lisa speaking at many recruitment industry events and being a recruitment technology and social media evangelist online. She works with some of the large recruitment firms, as well as the smaller, agile boutique agencies.
