Best Practices for Blog Writing for Underdog Colleges and Universities

What’s the difference between a college with a surplus of applications and one with an unacceptably high acceptance rate? Sometimes, it’s curiosity and nerve. Adversity — brought on by geographic isolation, shifting demographics, living in the shadows of giants, deep-pocketed for-profits and other Goliath competitors — can inspire a college and university to challenge assumptions and try new approaches to gain an unfair competitive advantage.

We call these schools underdog brands — and salute the leaders willing to rethink the potential of a school website, blog, and social channels. Underdog brands evolve from thinking of marketing assets as a fixed cost — an unwelcome guest knocking at the budget door — to seeing its potential to enlarge the vision and change institutional culture.

Underdog brands tend to serve a lot of first generation in college families and students with low social and network capital but a deep willingness to try harder. These students are unafraid to roll up their sleeves and get things done; they are seeking guidance about career pathways; and they are eager to find their rightful place in society. This creates an opportunity to create unique content with a specific point of view.

Here are some guidelines for creating and managing blog content for underdog college brands:

Goals

• Know your goals.
• Deliver practical, valuable and advice-oriented content.

Target Audience

• Speak to different generations of prospective students: high school, adult, online, and undergraduate.

Start with a Keyword or Key Phrase

• Identify the keyword or key phrase you would like your blog post to be ranked for, and search Google to see who else appears on page 1 of Google for that phrase.
• Infuse the keywords into your blog posts.
• Use SEO best practices to ensure that the blog has a fighting chance at securing page 1 Google ranking.

Content Focus

• Tell stories.
• Leverage newsjacking when appropriate.
• Act as a guidance and career counselor.
• Educate prospective students.
• Quote other authoritative peers and aspirational brands who’ll lend you credibility.
• Write blog posts with commensurate fidelity, which is less than that of an academic program page or a news item.
• Tie it back to the institutional offerings.
• Honor the blog writing style guide for the institution.

Voice

• Be positive, real, helpful, accessible, insightful, professional and knowledgeable.
• Avoid jargon.

Length

• Limit the length of blog post to less than 500 words.
• Build topic authority by creating a series of small blog posts instead of packing everything into one long one.

Engagement

• Share the blog post on your institutional social networks.
• Encourage questions and comments on the blog.
• Respond to comments on the blog and social media.

Measurement

• Measure blog post views with Google Analytics.
• Measure the number of shares and likes.
• Monitor Google rankings for the chosen keyword or key phrase.

I welcome you to share your guidelines with us.

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