Get ready, get set, blog! Before your fingers hit the keyboard, it's important to get your blogging plans in shape. By making a plan for your insurance agency blog, you'll ensure that your writing hits the mark and makes the impact that you want to make with your target audience.

Understand Your Audience

When you're blogging, you're not just writing for pleasure. You're writing for an audience, but who is that audience? Track the keywords or landing pages that people use to move onto your website, offer free products and see what people download most often, or ask your readers to take a short survey. Use all of these tools to pinpoint who your readers are and what they're most interested in, and focus your blogging energies accordingly.

Create Valuable Information

When you're blogging, make sure that you're not just filling space. Think about the topics that would appeal to and inform your core audience, as well as smaller segments of your audience, and focus on those. While it's helpful if these topics are in your areas of professional competency, be creative and think of new ways to approach the topics you cover. For example, if you sell medical insurance and know that parents make up a large portion of your core audience, you could write a post focused on childhood injuries and the need for prompt and thorough treatment. Position yourself as a valuable resource in your field, and your readers will come back to you when they need to purchase their insurance.

Be Consistent

If you're going to blog, commit to both the blogging and the promotion of your blogs. If you're intimidated by the commitment of blogging, don't worry: you don't need to post every day to be successful. A well-written and thoughtful blog once a week is often better than many little pieces of less valuable and less thoughtful information. Commit to promoting your blogs through social media as well, so that your posts will gain readers and become even more valuable to a larger audience.

Be Human

Unlike your business brochures, blogs are a casual medium. While it's important to write as well as you can, you can also be human. Let your personality come through in your blog, while still maintaining a professional disposition. If you make a mistake or you're receiving a lot of criticism, take this in, use it to shape your blog, and move on. Understand that your readers are people too, and focus on being an empathetic voice that's trying to help them navigate the world of insurance.

Add a Call to Action

Why are you blogging? It may be that you want to forge a strong connection with your readers, or you may have literary aspirations. However, one of your goals is probably related to sales. You want to connect with your prospective clients so that they turn into actual clients. One way to convert your customers is by using a strong call to action within your blog. While your post doesn't need to focus solely on sales, make sure that you mention what your company does and direct readers back to the paid services that you provide.

Additional Resources

If you're looking for in-depth online guides, downloadable PDF's, video tutorials, and a host of other blog development resources check out FirstSiteGuide. 

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