If blogging and horses are your passion, then you already have a winning formula. As co-judges on the annual Equestrian Blog Awards, created by blogger portal Haynet, the MirrorMePR equestrian PR team certainly know what makes a winning equestrian blog. In this blog, we share our top tips for creating a stand out equestrian blog that gets attention.
Judging these annual awards takes considerable time, and with this area becoming more and more competitive as each year passes, you really have to go the extra mile to make your blog stand out.
Right Or Write
First things first. Ensure that your spelling and grammar is checked and corrected. Nothing distracts the reader more than when content is full of bad spelling and incorrect grammar. Just as an equestrian press release needs to be perfect for publication, so does your blog. If spelling isn’t your thing, then invest in a grammar app to help correct your copywriting.
Lay It Down
Pay attention to how you lay out your equestrian copy. Your blog content should be easy to read, and keep the sentence and paragraphs short. Remember that a large amount of traffic to your equestrian blog will be coming via people viewing on mobiles, so they need to be able to read and enjoy your written content easily. Long paragraphs and wordy sentences can be off-putting and feel overwhelming to visitors to your website.
Talk With A Passion
As an equestrian PR team & Social Media Marketing Agency , we only represent equestrian brands and products we are truly passionate about. The reason for this? Because when you are excited about something, it makes it easy to talk about! Choose equestrian subjects that compel and excite you, and you will find creating content for your blog easy.
Plenty Of Personality
In PR & Marketing, we talk about ‘tone of voice’ but all this means is that the way you speak should reflect the personality of your brand or in this case, you. If you have a great sense of humour, love life, and are very light hearted, then translate this through your website content. If you enjoy joking with your audience, always double check your copy before posting, in case something is lost in translation. You want to entertain your readers not accidentally offend them!
Picture Perfect
You don’t have to be a professional photographer to create engaging images to accompany your blog. If you own a smartphone you have a camera at your fingertips, and by taking advantages of a great filter app, you can create eye-catching special effects or enhance them to marry up with the look and feel of your Instagram profile. There are lots of free image libraries around but where possible take your own photographs to give your website a unique personality and feel.
Walk This Way
As an equestrian PR team, we know how important it is to ensure that your equestrian blogging website is easy to navigate. Dropdown menus that list them by subject matter is a really nice way for website visitors to read and discover your content. It may be that your blog about more than one area of focus. If so, this is an ideal way to introduce your website visitors to your areas of interest.
Commercial Or Creative?
If you are looking to become an influencer, then you might want to make blogging commercially viable for you. This will mean working with brands and products. You can still be creative, but the mix between ‘advertorials’ and your genuine blog content needs to be evenly spread. As an equestrian PR agency with plenty of influencer marketing experience, if we are looking to align a brand or product with a blogger, we will do a lot of research. One of the aspects we will look at carefully is the balance of commercial posts versus the bloggers’ own organic content.
If the blogger is too ‘product heavy’ and they have blog after blog promoting products and brands through paid content and little else, it will put us off. A good way to separate your organic blog content and your ‘paid’ blogs is to build a section called ‘Reviews’ and put them all in there. This means that on visiting your blog, readers can read through your content naturally or choose to dive straight into your reviews section to read your paid associations. Remember, even if a brand has gifted you a product and no money has changed hands, that is still seen as a form of payment, with rules of transparency surrounding this declaration.
