After an awe-inspiring two weeks, the London Olympics came to a close on Sunday 13th August. With hundreds of athletes from all around the world competing in over 300 events, it is being called one of the greatest Olympics of recent times.
As we explained in our blog post from earlier in the week, as blogging is so versatile, it can be linked to a vast array of different topics and here we want to share our thoughts on what you can take from the London Olympics to help with your business blogging activities.
It’s not just one aspect that has an impact
During the Olympics, we all became fans of events that some didn’t even know were included in the Games (or which were even real sports!). From handball through to the BMX event, our love for the Games – and our patriotism – meant that whichever event Team GB were participating in, we were fully behind our athletes and wanted them to grab a medal.
Whilst blogging is without doubt about the production of content, there’s so much more to consider – some aspects that readers don’t even see or think about – that without them all working together, the end result isn’t as beneficial as it could be.
Take the SEO aspect as an example. Great content is a necessity for blogging, but if you want to see the most benefits for SEO, you have to be certain you’ve got the right amount of keywords in your copy. You need to use the keywords as – or near to – the anchor text for your links. What’s more, the links themselves need to be relevant to the anchor text and topic as a whole. Then you also have to consider meta data – it might not have as much of an impact as it used to have, but it’s still beneficial to fill it in effectively.
Separately, all of the components of a business blogging strategy are important, but when you bring them together, the end results can be outstanding.
Exceeding your readers’ expectations is always beneficial
Although the ‘home team’, Team GB weren’t expected to do anywhere near as well as they did, eventually taking home a total of 65 medals, including 29 gold. Everyone was expecting a few medals, but we were completely blown away by how many our athletes managed to achieve.
People expect certain things of blogging. They expect to read good quality content and they expect it to be beneficial in some way. However, if you can go that extra mile and deliver something that goes far beyond your readers’ expectations, you’ll find that the end result is one that you as the company didn’t expect.
Copy alone, for instance, might go a long way to explaining your message and being of benefit to the reader. As soon as you include suitable images and video, however, you increase the value of the piece, delivering above and beyond what the reader will first have anticipated.
You need to invest to see results
Over the last four years, millions have been invested into sports facilities up and down the UK. Although as a country we saw some success at the Olympic Games prior to this investment, it’s obvious how much of an impact the money has had on our athletes.
You don’t need to spend millions on your blogging strategy, but you do need to understand that an investment needs to be made and generally speaking, the larger the investment, the better the results.
Let’s say you created a business blog with a really basic design and updated it twice a month. Would you see results? Yes, this would impact on various parts of your business. Would the results be instant or long-lasting? Probably not, no.
Now up your investment. You’ve had a bespoke blog developed, integrated it with all social media accounts, had it designed for the best levels of reader engagement and you produce fresh, high quality, unique content three times a week – not only will the results be seen quicker, but they’ll be longer lasting and of substantially more benefit.
The 2012 London Olympics has had a fantastic effect on various organisations and industries and with just a little thought, you can take away a lot of information that can be beneficial for your business blogging strategy.
