Blogs For Your Club - Why You Should Use Them
Let's address the elephant in the room: I am a writer. I write for money and for fun. I read books about writers, watch movies about writers, research writers, and even write about how writers write. The word "write" has lost all meaning to me after that sentence.
The point is, of course I think that writing blogs is a good use of your time and a crucial step in growing your club or association. However, I'm not alone in this belief; writing blogs is an incredibly widespread and provenly effective approach. I even consulted with the writer's natural enemy, numbers, and even they agreed. Regularly posting blogs is an effective way to grow your brand awareness, increase engagement time, and grow your customer base. While these statistics are about how blogs help businesses, they will all hold true when it comes to how blogs help clubs and associations.
So, lend me your ears, and let me quickly show you why you should be using blogs as part of running your club and also how to best write those blogs.
Why You Should Use Blogs To Help Build Awareness & Engagement For Your Club
Blogs, articles, stories, whatever you want to call them, are a provenly effective way to increase engagement and attention on your club's website. As I said in the beginning, I researched statistics to support this claim and found many; below are just seven about how widely used blogs are and their effectiveness.
Every statistic I could find pointed towards the same thing:
- Blogs are an effective way to increase your SEO ranking
- They drive more traffic to your website
- People overwhelmingly want and read blog articles
- Blogs are a key part of the “buyer’s journey”
I realise that as a club, you have members, not buyers, but their journey is still very similar. They still want the same kinds of information as a buyer and in the same format. Potential members will engage in blog content just like buyers would, which will help grow your club.
Okay, so I think we’ve comfortably established that blogs are a key piece of your club’s marketing that you really should be using. The question we now need to answer is, “so why don't more clubs use blogs?”. So, let’s talk about it.
Why Don’t More Clubs & Associations Utilise Blogs?
Honestly, the main reason why more clubs and associations don't use their blogs is because they don't see the value in it. I feel like we've covered that enough already, so let's move on. The second reason people don't use blogs as much as they should is that they think that it's too hard to write them, which is just not true.
Yes, writing fiction is hard; writing a book makes me feel like my brain will slide out of my ears, but writing the sorts of non-fiction blog articles needed for most clubs is fun. I won't lie and say that it's a cakewalk, but I'm confident that it is something that anyone can do.
Writing Blogs Seems Too Hard Or They Don’t Have The Right People To Do So
One of the biggest hurdles for many clubs is the misconception that blogging requires professional writing skills. But don't worry; you don't need to be a literary genius to create engaging and informative content for your members.
Today's powerful AI writing tools, like Google Gemini, Grammarly, and Hemingway, can be invaluable allies in your blogging journey. They can help you:
- Generate ideas and outlines: AI tools are super handy for helping you brainstorm your ideas and structure your blog posts.
- Refine your writing: AI tools are great for helping you polish your grammar, sentence structure, and clarity with AI-powered suggestions.
- Overcome writer's block: Use AI to generate initial drafts or overcome those moments where you can just not work out what you need to say next.
These tools act as your digital writing assistants, helping you craft compelling content that will help drive people to your club's website. They’re basically Clippy on Steroids. Don’t worry; I’m not going to mention Clippy on steroids without creating an image of it. I'm not a monster.
I really hope people remember Clippy; otherwise, I'm going to look insane here.
To learn more about how you can use AI to make content for your whole website, not just your blog, read How To Use AI To Generate Content For Your Club's Website.
If you're not a fan of using AI writing tools and can't afford to hire a professional writer, you can try reaching out to the younger generation. Consider asking parents with teenagers or young adults who are interested in writing to contribute to the club's blog. They might be willing to do so without payment.
For a budding writer in their late teens or early twenties, the opportunity to have their work published and read by a real audience can be incredibly motivating. I vividly remember the thrill of seeing my first article in print, even though it was for a free university magazine. The sense of accomplishment and validation was priceless.
I guarantee there are other aspiring writers or simply curious individuals in your club who would be eager to try their hand at writing an article or two. It's a win-win: they gain valuable experience and exposure, and your club gets fresh, engaging content for its blog.
In case you were wondering, my first ever published article was a review of the film The Neon Demon by my all-time favourite director. It's not his best film, but it is absolutely dripping in style and nerve-shredding tension. I still have a copy of the magazine it appeared in somewhere in my mum's house.
My point is that if you are looking for writers but can’t afford to pay for one, I’m sure you could get a few articles from club members' kids who are interested. Just remember, you aren’t paying them; they don’t work for you. They are just volunteering to help out, so treat them like any other club volunteer.
What Your Blog Articles Should Be About
One question you probably have is, what should your blogs be about? Well, there are a fair few options here, and ultimately, it depends on you. Let’s talk about some of the best options.
Knowledge Articles
First, you should consider writing articles that help your members either with how they interact with your club or with the activity your club is about. For example, let’s say you run a kayaking club. You could write an article about how members can use the system to find details about upcoming events. This will help them understand the system better. You could also write an article breaking down the pros and cons of Euro vs Greenland paddles. This will help them understand your club’s core activity better.
For the two of you who are curious, Euro paddles are what we commonly associate with kayak paddles, with short and stubby, with almost spoon-shaped blades. Greenland paddles are a more traditional style of paddle with long, flat, narrow blades that tend to lessen the strain on the shoulders.
The point is that you write articles that increase your members' knowledge base, both about your club and how it works and about your core club activity. These could be the pros and cons of certain products, how-to guides, and gear reviews; it doesn’t matter as long as it helps your members.
Articles That Answer Questions
As a club admin, you probably get asked the same questions repeatedly. You can save time by creating articles that answer these common questions. For example, if members frequently ask about the qualifications needed for a specific event or what gear to pack for another event, you can create articles with these answers. When someone asks about updating their details or purchasing tickets, you can simply forward them the relevant article instead of typing out the instructions each time. This will save you and your fellow admins a lot of time.
These really are the two core types of articles you want to write for your club. Knowledge articles that provide extra value to your membership and grow your members' knowledge base, and question articles that will save your team time by answering questions in great detail before your members even ask them. Beyond that, the sky is the limit for the types of articles you can write for your club; it all depends on what information you want to give them.
5 Tips To Write Amazing Blogs For Your Club Or Association
Okay, so we’ve established that blogs are useful and something you absolutely should be doing to grow your club or association. We have also established that between using AI and getting people to volunteer to write blog articles for you it is something that every club can achieve. So, let’s quickly talk about some tips to make those blogs as good as possible.
1. Use AI Tools
I don’t care that I’ve already mentioned them; it bears repeating. AI tools are a brilliant way to make blog articles much more accessible and easy to write. Again, do check out How To Use AI To Generate Content For Your Club’s Website.
2. Keep It Simple
One really easy thing to remember is to keep your blog articles simple and easy to read. Use short, simple sentences, avoid long, overly complicated words, and avoid overly flowery prose. You want anyone to be able to pick up one of your articles and read it; they will not do that if they need a thesaurus open to understand what you’re trying to say.
The general rule is to aim for a reading grade of between 7 to 9. This means that anyone with a year seven to year nine education in school should have no trouble reading and understanding your writing. Now, for some medical and more technical associations, having a higher reading grade is fine. If I were writing a blog for a medical association, I would be happy with a reading grade of 10 - 12. Likely, all of your members will have a higher reading grade than your writing, but that’s the idea. You want your members to be able to easily read your blogs; you don’t want them to feel like they are back in uni trying to decipher academic grade writing.
Hemmingway Editor, which I already mentioned, has a great feature where it will tell you the reading grade of any piece of writing you put into it. This is a super useful guide for checking your accessibility, and it is definitely something worth looking at. For reference, I checked this article in Hemmingway, and it was a reading* grade of 8.
3. Front Load all Your Important Information
Only about 50% of the people who click on a blog article will actually finish it. This means that you need to front-load all of your information or, if that is not possible, have a quick, snappy start that catches the reader's attention and introduces your subject. If you waffle on like seemingly every online recipe I’ve ever read does, people will click off before they find out what you want them to know and what the article is really about.
You should also order the content in your article in descending order of importance. This means you have the most important section at the top and work down the least important section. Take this article for example. It has four main sections; why blogs are good, how to write blogs good, good topics to write blogs about and now, good blog writing tips for good blogs that are good.
These three sections are ordered in descending order of importance. That’s not to say that this section isn’t important or valuable; it is; at least, I very much hope it's valuable and helpful. It is just that the part that I want the most people to see is the part about statistics around blogs and their usefulness, so that goes first. This means that the highest possible percentage of people who click on this article will take away that message.
So, apply this to your own writing. Don’t leave the key details to last; get the hook in nice and early, and make sure people see your key information.
4. Keep It Short
It’s no secret that people have pretty short attention spans, I personally got distracted twice while writing this very sentence. So, the key here is to keep your blog articles short and punchy.
There is no golden rule here regarding how long a good blog article should be, but I have two recommendations.
One, just write it until it is done being written. Don’t think about word count and length; just write it until you have covered everything you want to cover in the amount of detail you want. Once you’ve done that, it doesn’t matter if your blog is 500 words long or 3,000; that is how long your blog should be.
Two, while articles over 2,000 words are perfectly valid, and there is nothing wrong with posting them, once I have written over 2,000 words on an article, I check to see if there is actually enough content for two separate articles. Sometimes, the content might be too similar to split, but often, I find that a 2,500-word article would work better as two smaller ones.
According to the stats I found, the average blog is 1,416 words long. This tracks with my experience, too. Yes, I have a few blog articles that are less than 700 words, and I have one that is well over 3,000, but generally speaking, the articles I write for Member Jungle sit between 1,000 and 2,500 words each.
5. Give It A Personality
You and your club have a unique tone of voice and unique personality; you should do your best to show it off in your blogs because, at the end of the day, no one wants to read boring, bland, personality-free writing. It might be a little tricky at the start, but you should do your best to let your club’s unique tone of voice shine through.
Take, for example, my writing for Member Jungle. Member Jungle is a quirky, fun-loving business who has a particular passion for animals and animal conservation. This pairs really well with my pathological inability to take anything seriously and love of finding weird, obscure facts. Due to this, I feel as though the articles I write for Member Jungle tend to be funny and entertaining (hopefully) as well as informative.
There aren't a lot of other tech companies that would let me get away with going on mini-rants about how weird Tapirs are.
Tapirs are large nocturnal herbivores that can grow up to 300kg, are good swimmers who can use their proboscis as a snorkel while swimming underwater and to pluck leaves, and there’s no other way to say this, they have large prehensile penises that they can use to scratch their own backs. And that’s just scratching the surface of how strange these animals are.
My point is that the Member Jungle blog articles have their own particular voice and style that makes them unique and (hopefully) helps them stick in people's minds. You, too, should do your best to find your unique voice and ensure it shines through in your blogs.
More Tips For Maximising Your Club’s Blogs
I’ve already mentioned it twice, but read How To Use AI To Generate Content For Your Club’s Website for more tips on using AI to help you with all this.
If you have made it this far, and I still haven’t convinced you that you should be writing blogs, then fear not. There are more uses for the Member Jungle Blog module than just blogs, and you can read all about them here: The Best Ways To Use Your Blog Module For Things That Aren’t Blogs.
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