These blogs posts are the fuel for the inbound marketing machine that our clients hire us to operate, which takes a lot of hard work and organization, and we truly believe we've mastered the process.

Here at StoryTeller, creating content is what we do. Each month we publish nearly 100 blog posts for clients in industries such as health care, retail, manufacturing and golf.

So with that in mind, here are our 4 tips for staying on top of your blog strategy in 2016.

1. Aim Each Post at a Single Person

When a hitter in baseball is in a slump, it's usually because he's had a series of bad at-bats and is starting to question all the things he's doing wrong â€" from his stance to his swing to how well he's seeing the ball out of the pitcher's hand. 

A good hitting coach will help the slumping hitter focus on one thing at a time so he's not trying to overhaul his entire swing all at once. 

Well, a marketer whose blog isn't connecting with her audience is no different. Instead of thinking of all the different people who may be reading your blog, focus on writing to one specific person for each post that you write. It's the best way to get out of an "audience slump" and keep your content relevant.

2. Attack Specific Keywords

Because there are so many things to focus on when writing your business blog (audience, headline, links, images, calls-to-action etc.) keywords have a way of floating to the background. And frankly, this is a dangerous tendency! 

The whole point of blogging for business is to drive traffic, not just through your distribution channels (social media, email, PPC), but through organic search. But the latter only happens when you strategically choose a keyword and structure your blog content around that keyword, using it in the title, URL, body copy, and meta description. 

We know blogging regularly gets difficult sometimes, but the volume of content produced should never negatively impact how strategic your keyword targeting is.

3. Hyperlink Wisely

One of the biggest mistakes we see content marketers make is hyperlinking to outside websites that have nothing to do with their business â€" or worse â€" adding hyperlinks that redirect to their competitors' websites! 

Remember that every blog you write is an opportunity to build page authority for other pages on your site. We suggest making a list of site pages and blog posts that have a chance to rank higher for a specific keyword on Google.

For instance, it would be wise to link to one of your website pages that is ranking in the 10-30 range for a specific keyword. Linking to the page could help you jump in to the top 10, and thus, on to the first page of Google's results page. 

Pro Tip: If you're having trouble finding a word that can be linked to another page in a contextually relevant fashion (i.e. it would confuse the reader if they clicked) try using a read more interrupter such as the one you see below....

4. Go Long (When You Can)

Look, we know writing long blog posts doesn't always fit into your busy schedule. That said, the numbers show it can be really, really beneficial. 

According to HubSpot there is a positive correlation between increased word count in a blog post and how many referral links a blog post earns. (One exception being that posts under 250 words generate more referral links than posts between 250 and 750 words). To see the full graph, click here.

So when you're feeling inspired, don't worry that you might be "boring" your audience with a long post. Keep writing - the links will come! 

Brian Overson is the Marketing Associate at StoryTeller Media + Communications. StoryTeller is an inbound marketing agency based in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Brian blogs about content marketing, social media and digital strategy. Find him on Twitter @brianoverson.

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