It’s true that blog posts are effective tools in driving website traffic while indirectly promoting brand awareness for the IT and Software industries (that wouldn’t be one hot topic if they don’t).
But a few questions are boggling my mind:
Will it do the same for the payroll industry?
What topics would mostly grab the reader’s attention and gain more clickthroughs?
Are there any other themes that can be discussed other than HR and Finance?
I wanted to find out the answers myself so I googled some top payroll software providers to see how they managed to stand out among the crowd by optimizing blog posts with useful content and keywords that put them ahead of the race. Here are a few things I learned from scraping the search results. Indeed no industry is boring in blogging even payroll software can be perky in some ways.
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Blogging Tip #1: Share ideas on how your clients can leverage time
The idea was clearly pointed out in the article. Simple as it may look, Quickbooks presented ideas and used keywords about finding apps that would best fit their business, attract their target audience, and showed how to optimize time using these apps.
Title: Unleash the Power of Quickbooks Apps
“To figure out which apps would be most useful, think about where the bottleneck is in your accounting. What’s taking so much time? Where do you see a vulnerability? Whatever your motivation for exploring apps is, I recommend that you spend some time initially thinking through these questions. Ultimately, apps will help you save time by unleashing the power of QuickBooks in a way that is specifically customized for your business needs. ”
Read the article here.
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Blogging Tip #2: Promote Work-Life Balance
They call themselves “HR for Humans”, and this is magnified through blog topics that strongly put people and culture together to the fore, by providing notable links to relatively important and beneficial facts in the article – good move to gain more clickthroughs to increase website traffic.
Title: Employees Go Gaga For These Two Parental Leave Policies
“A thoughtful solution to paid family leave doesn’t mean productivity ceases. It means employees are ready to give even more to your company and your brand because of how much you commit to them. That is, once they’re able to catch a good night’s sleep.”
Namely has done a great job in drawing a reader’s emotional attraction into their content about parental leave. It featured facts regarding the different HR benefits among companies and the employees’ high hopes on the approval of the proposed extended sick and parental leave.
Genuine are the companies who never forget to value the family element. Check out this inspiring post by our CEO, Rom Agustin, The Family Element: The Most Important Factor for Callbox’s Success.
Blogging Tip #3: Dare to Compare
What’s best about the content is the formatted presentation between FSA and HSA that enables the reader to distinguish each account’s features that fit his needs. The article also used keywords that provide insights to employees on their options of which savings accounts to go with and tips on how employers should manage their employee’s deductions without taking so much from their take-home pays.
Title: FSA vs. HSA: What’s the Difference?
“Some companies offer both an FSA and HSA option for the employees on their small business payroll, depending on which health insurance plan they select. Compare the options between FSA vs. HSA:”
Patriot Software shed light on the difference between Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSA). The blog discussed each account’s features like Eligibility, Annual Dollar Contribution Limits, Account Ownership, Access to your Money, Usability, Substantiation and Options to Change Contributions. Read the article here.
Check out! Is Quality B2B Content DEAD? Do you believe this?
Blogging Tip #4: Bring sunshine. Start off with a positive tone
Workday gives us light and easy to read content about aligning HR and business leaders or operations’ views and processes. Most of their blog titles have fancy positive tones. The introductory paragraph did well in stating a common scenario between the two groups, which was supported by research regarding each one’s priorities for process improvement, but each was given a fair conclusion of how they could affect and support each other to gain streamlined workflow as a whole.
Title: Better Together: Areas Where HR and Business Leaders Can Align in 2016
“HR must now do more to help the business understand how engagement initiatives matter, given that this was not an area of focus for other business leaders in this year’s report. HR leaders must connect the dots: Strong employee engagement is critical to achieving business leaders’ main priority of increased customer focus. Read the article here…
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Blogging Tip #5: Appeal to Reader’s Emotion
Blog writing for the payroll industry is not just about producing technical and jargon-filled content. This particular article about recognizing your employees’ work and worth in the company uses ideas and keywords that emotionally appeal to both leaders and subordinates, connote positive thoughts and actions, and injects a deeper motivation to the employees to perform better over time.
Title: Happy Employee Appreciation Day!
“A high five. A heartfelt thank-you note. A quick acknowledgment at an all-hands meeting. These ordinary things can bring out the extraordinary in people. When you take a moment to recognize someone’s work, it helps them feel proud of the work they do.”
Gusto stands out in graphics – nice and simple yet vivid representations of the what, how or who the article is all about. Ideas were presented in such a way that a reader could easily picture it out in his mind and likely to recall.
Also never forget to relate the content with the trending topics like:
Why Best Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is “King of the World” After his Speech at Oscars
What IT Leaders can Learn from (the fall of) Nokia
The companies I have searched and the blogs that I have read proved that there are just so many stories to tell and topics to discuss with other than minimum salary wage laws and tax advisories. Like any other major industries as IT and Software, cogent blogs attract website traffic and promote branding awareness for the Payroll industry just the same.
