The Garden Dispatch: 4 Tips for Better Blogging

Shawna Coronado

Customers want to have a personal relationship with you. Writing regular blog posts can be an incredibly effective way to get both new and regular customers back to your website so they might get to know your company more personally.

Blogging should be a snap, not a chore. Stop writing those long, complicated, ineffective blogs and start creating smarter posts that truly draw more customers in to read your company news. Consumers are interested in appealing blogs where the posts are short, sweet and interesting with lots of visual appeal. To make blogging less work and more fun, follow these tips.

1. Always Include Photos
Photos are an important part of a blog and “photo blogging” is becoming increasingly popular. Photo blogging is when a blogger utilizes a photo and a simple sentence or two for description as the primary blog content. Imagine how easy it would be to throw up a few photos to tell the story to your customer instead of writing a lengthy post. Every blog should have at least one photo that’s clear and interesting.

2. Better Headings = More Views
Use keywords in headings to increase your blog’s ranking with search engines. Keywords should be placed first in the heading; however, keywords will lose their power if they’re too numerous or the viewer doesn’t understand them. Below are two headings. Each has the proper keyword ingredients, yet the one that makes sense will be more consistently clicked on by viewers who are searching for the topic.

Good Heading: How To Prevent Tomato Blight
Ineffective Heading: Tomato Blight Spray Issues Prevention Damage

3. Shorten Blog Posts
Quality versus quantity applies to blog writing. Our modern world moves at a fast pace and most people want to read quick tips with beautiful and clear visuals. Save a longer post for a special project that might be accompanied by a story-telling photo spread.

Posts should typically be 200 to 500 words long.

Start by posting once per week. Write posts in the “off season” when business is at a slower pace, then schedule posts to go live at later dates throughout the season.

Use topic keywords in the first and last paragraph whenever possible.

4. Great Consumer Gardening Topics
Below is a list of garden industry topic ideas. When considering topic ideas, make the stories you write personal so you’re able to build a relationship with the viewer.

Blog about how to grow plants or tips on how to garden. This includes everything from the soil up—composting, soil management, planting, watering, seed production, plants, container planting, ornamental edibles, annual flower combinations, pollinator attractor ideas and gardening for birds or wildlife.
Share blog ideas with your product partners to produce posts that talk about how to use a product.
If the company is run by a family, show photos of the family and tell stories about why the family loves the business and community.
Tell company employee stories. Feature an employee of the month and let the customer get to know them through the blog posts.
Show videos—how-to videos, videos about the company, videos about employees and videos about partner products.
Show posts that discuss the community help projects you’ve done in the season. Have you sponsored a baseball team? Donated food to the hungry? Donated plants to not-for-profit organizations or native plant conservation groups? All of these topics are great blog posts.

By following the above tips—shortening blog posts, including more photos and keywords, snappier headlines and focusing on better topics—your business will be more effective at blogging. GP

Shawna Coronado is a gardening author, photographer, blogger, speaker and all around green lifestyle evangelist. She can be reached at contact@shawnacoronado.com.