I had a fantastic time featuring on the Women in Planning Webinar today with Nicola Gooch, Zack Simons, Suzi Green, and Christian Cardiss. 

We are currently having to replace the face to face communication we have with our clients and are therefore having to find ways to connect with them digitally. Publishing your insights in the form of a blog is a fantastic way to stay virtually close to clients whilst still positioning yourself as a trusted advisor. 

We all shared some of our top tips for writing a successful blog. Below is a short summary of some of the key discussions: 

How should you plan your content? 

There are different ways in which people plan content. For example, Nicola plans her content around  frequency and makes sure that she is committed to producing a set number of posts per month. 

On the other hand, Zack uses recent client conversations as a starting point. Both of these approaches result in consistent content being produced. A good approach that is also taken by Nicola, Zack and Christian is to plan content around clients and strategic opportunities. 

Think about what your clients are currently interested in and their challenges and write for them. This way you are certain that your content is going to be relevant for your audience and aligns with your business goals. 

How do you choose your 'style' or 'voice'? 

When creating content a lot of people wonder what style they should be writing in. It was heavily agreed today that you should be writing in the same way you would communicate face to face. 

Face to face communication is valued in the same way digitally and allows you to express your personality. It is also important to write about what interests you, whether that is pop culture or sport, there is an expert angle on almost everything. 

How can you drive engagement with your blog? 

The simple answer here is "share, share, share". This can be broken down into the following process: 

• As soon as you create your content, share this internally with your colleagues. It is very likely this content is useful to them and their clients. Your colleagues can share this content with their networks which largely increases your reach. 
• After sharing the content internally, it is then important to choose your channel to market. Make sure this content is being shared with the relevant channels where you can reach your clients (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Email). 
• Finally, it is important to promote your blog in an effective way. When sharing to the social networks make sure you are name checking relevant people and use appropriate hashtags. 

It is also useful to note that you need to be consistently creating this content to grow your readership, it will not come off the back of one post.