The pre-flight checklist for blogging in higher education
“We want to start a blog!”
Starting a blog should not be taken likely.
We are way past the time you could publish something online and have it rise to the top of Google with a few well-placed keywords.
This is my pre-flight checklist for any university blogging project.
If your project, or the one that you’ve been asked to push through for the Dean, doesn’t meet all the criteria then maybe consider postponing it until you’ve had time to think things through.
Checklist
Market
With everything going on in the world – political movements, pandemics and larger economic factors – is this the best time to be launching your blog about arts event management?
Generally, will your audience care about your blog in the current environment?
Audience
How will you build an audience?
Do you already have access to the audience that you are trying to engage?
If so, think about how you will seed this content – sharing that you have a blog with clients, publishing subscribe links on relevant webpages, doing Q&As with key players in your industry…
Be an advocate for your content.
Objectives
Why are you doing this and what do you want to achieve?
Overall, your objective should be to build authority amongst your target audience so that they think of you for ‘X’ further into their user journey, but what other hard objectives do you want to meet?
How will you know that your project has been a success?
Metrics
How will you track that you are on your way to your objective?
For example, if you publish once a week and your email subscriber list grows to 500 within six months, that is an indication that your content is gaining traction.
Can you attribute the blog to increased traffic to your website or specific conversions?
How can you demonstrate value to stakeholders?
Resource
Can you or your business partner sustain this blogging effort?
The most successful blogs are consistent, publishing at the same time every week and deal with related topics.
Block out time for research and writing each week.
Topic niche
The best way to succeed in blogging today is to dominate a topic niche.
Rather than starting a generic university blog, think about going deep in one area.
For example, rather than starting a blog on marketing, you might opt to start a blog on PPC advertising or community management.
What tools will you use to research your topic niche and how are competing brands approaching the same area
Branding
Today, even niche topics are often saturated. To stand out you will need to align your authority with strong branding.
How does your blog fit with other university activities and how can they contribute to raising its profile?
Can you use existing networks to strengthen your blog’s brand and make it distinctive amongst competing content?
What is the personality of your content and how will you convey that to be distinctive?
Subscribers
If you are serious about your blogging efforts, build an email subscriber list.
Unlike when you build an audience on social media platforms, you will own access to your audience and not have it mediated by algorithms and somebody else’s rules.
Platform
Is your website suitable for blogging?
Can you publish content easily and does it look professional to your readers?
Consider things like text size, page load speed and accessibility.
For example, is it really a good idea to publish 8 videos on a single page when most of your audience are viewing the site on their 4G connection while commuting?
SEO
If you are starting a blog from scratch and want to rank on the first page of Google, then prepare yourself for a long road.
It can take years for this to happen, so ask yourself if SEO is really that important for your project.
Realistically, will readers happen across your content from a Google search, or will they subscribe to email marketing list via your wider branding activity?
Review
How will you assess which content is working and where you could have done better?
If you have published a long form, evergreen piece to rank for specific key phrases then how often will you return to the content to update it?
How will you get feedback from your audience that you are giving them what they need?
My advice to anyone starting blogging today is “stay determined”.
So many start with enthusiasm and throw in the towel after only a few weeks.
Work with your audience, get their feedback and be dependable.
It may be the case that you won’t start seeing a return on your investment until the end of the first year. And that’s fine.
You just need to keep on going and tread carefully with the dream.
