What kind of content is on your blog? Do you work to create timely, relevant material for your audience, or is your focus on evergreen posts? How-to articles and top 10 lists are great, but the best posts show that your brand is current and on top of trends.
To help every brand write better blog content, Ebyline asked the fashion divas at ModCloth for a few tips. ModCloth, a women’s fashion e-tailer that brought in $100 million in revenue in 2012, is known for its in-the-moment fashion coverage. From hot Derby Day looks to fashion hits for a spring wedding, the writing team knows how to generate well-timed pieces.
Rebecca Brown, ModCloth’s editorial manager, offers some insight into their content creation along with some tips to keep your blog up to date.
Get organized
Writing timely content doesn’t mean you can’t plan ahead. A lot of events and trends happen every year. With this in mind, the ModCloth team brainstorms ideas and creates an editorial calendar eight weeks in advance of publication. In other words their writers are creating posts about prom season two months before the big school dance.
If you’re not doing so already, Brown suggests creating an editorial calendar that gives your team some writing leeway. This way, when spring weddings are trending, no one is running around the office cobbling together subpar content.
Be obsessed
To keep your posts relevant and focused, you have to be acutely aware of what’s happening in your industry, Brown says. She’s not talking about a can’t-eat, can’t-sleep kind of obsession, but it should be close. To say the ModCloth writers are knowledgeable about the fashion industry would be an understatement. They’re naturally curious about trends, so they’re always digging up research, checking fashion blogs, and looking for the next big topics. These writers are thinking about blog posts long before an editorial meeting rolls around.
This level of commitment shows the blogging audience that ModCloth knows its stuff. “The stories we craft need to feel organic to the site,” Brown says. “Our girl is smart; she’ll know right away if we’re faking it.”
Write content you would share
It goes without saying that you want high quality content on your blog, but you should also consider an article’s social sharability, Brown says. How do you know if a post will gain traction on Facebook and Twitter? Brown says writers should ask themselves the following questions:
“Are you creating something that you’d post onto your Facebook wall or in your Twitter feed? Is this something that you’d be proud to share with your own personal audience? If the answer is no, then your readers probably won’t want to either.”
Find a killer image
You’ve planned ahead and given your team enough time to create must-read content, but you’re not done, Brown says. You need to find a killer image, or three or four.
“We challenge ourselves to produce copy that’s smart and fun, but words are only half the story. We need appropriate, striking, and high-resolution visuals to complete the picture,” she says.
“Everything is photo-driven. We’re drawn towards products that are beautifully displayed in a variety of angles; we expect to see that. The more pictures, the better.”
The ModCloth team puts all of these tips into action to keep its blog full of fresh content. Readers have come to expect timely articles from the indie clothing site and Brown says the writers at ModCloth refuse to let them down.
How does your brand produce its best content? What’s your planning process? Tell us in the comment section below.
