3 Practices to Improve Your Firm’s Blog Posts
on Oct 18, 2016
For the last five years, I’ve tracked the industry’s blog posts and seen tremendous growth. Growth in number of firms, frequency of posts, and quality per post. In the quality dimension, many aspects of individual posts taken for granted now were absent five years ago. For example, these four details were not commonplace:
Authors’ names (many posts were published by “admin” or “asset manager”)
Charts, graphs and data tables (many posts were 500+ words of straight text)
Links to related thought leadership
A clear conclusion
From reading hundreds of industry blog posts, I want to share three favorite practices.
- Include a “Bottom line.” Too many times, authors post 500+ word entries without a highlighted point of view or logical next step. A bottom line reiterates a single idea to take away.
- Add only relevant and simple charts. Many posts include unnecessarily complex charts. Each week, I come across a chart with multiple vertical axes, and data in both line and bar chart form. If the post’s point is so complex it requires such a difficult chart, perhaps a whitepaper is a better format.
- Use a precise question as the title. Of the three, this practice is changing the most quickly in 2016. Still, we see posts titled “Q2 Bond Update” or “Views from Asia.” Titles like this often undersell the quality within. Title-as-question is not preferred for all posts, yet many posts could benefit from this format.
I imagine in 5 years’ time these will be commonplace across the industry.