Elevate Your Nonprofit Blog and Connect with Your Supporters

Research shows that organizations that blog have 55% more website visitors. You can use your nonprofit blog as a marketing asset that can potentially bring you high-quality web traffic, generate new supporters, and increase awareness for your cause. However, merely writing blog articles won’t dramatically transform your web presence. Your blog has to be well-optimized and promoted, and most of all, rich with content.

Below are tips to consider when using a blog to market for your nonprofit:

1. Think like a publisher, not a nonprofit blogger.

You are not a nonprofit blogger, you are a vertically integrated online publisher. Your job isn’t to publish an article or two each week. Instead, you have the same responsibilities that publishers in traditional media have; the only difference is that all of those responsibilities are tied directly to your organization.

Publishers have to create relevant content, determine the best methods to publicize their content to improve reach, and define advertising opportunities as well as manage them. As a vertically integrated publisher, you should do all of these things for your nonprofit to ensure that the content you create is valuable to prospective constituents and is delivered in a way that can support awareness and growth.

2. Focus on non-branded keyword content.

It is likely that, if you have spent some time optimizing your website, you rank well in search engines for your nonprofit name and related terms. However, blogs used for marketing provide the opportunity to build incoming traffic from non-branded keywords.

For example, if you are a not-for-profit dog shelter, you should be writing about the larger issues that bring dogs into your shelter in the first place and answering common questions about your cause rather than simply blogging about what your shelter does.

3. Ask readers what they want.

It is easy to get caught up in the type of information you think is interesting, but after blogging for a few months, you’ll experience the need to ask readers what they want.

Assumptions can often be wrong, so conduct a survey on your business blog as a way to obtain clear feedback from readers. Questions should address topics for future posts and types of content readers prefer (e.g. text vs. audio vs. video, etc.), and the survey should also include space for comments to give readers the opportunity to make their own, personalized suggestions.

4. Connect your blog with your website.

Blogs can be a major source of new traffic from search engines and social media. Realize that a blog post may be the first thing a potential customer sees about your organization. Having a blog as part of your website, either as a subdomain (blog. yourdomain.com) or as a page (yourdomain. com/blog) is an important step to allow first-time visitors to easily learn additional information about your organization.

More Resources:

How to Make Splash Using Your Nonprofit Blog – The Creative Industry

6 Titillating Tips on Blogging for Your Nonprofit – Huffington Post

Should Your Nonprofit Start a Blog – Wired Impact

6 Essential Components of Top Notch Nonprofit Blogs – Hubspot

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