Improve Your Blog (4 of 5)
Asset managers continue to blog with more frequency. This week, I counted 73 different posts from asset managers and I surely missed a few. One technique used sparingly but effectively is the question and answer. We think including a few Q&A posts each month improves a blog’s overall quality.
The basics for a quality question and answer (Q&A) blog posts include:
- A single topic
- A short set of questions, 2 to 5, that are direct and require an opinion
- Short format answers (Remember, everybody scans before reading)
This post from Wells Fargo is a a sturdy example from last week. The single topic is gold. The post has two direct questions:
- Why have gold stocks begun to outperform?
- What lies ahead?
The answers are a bit too long, but overall the execution is strong.
The question and answer format works so well because the reader can quickly assess if these are questions they want answered. If the questions are not important, he moves on. If they are important, he can transition from scanning to reading and subsequently to internalizing.
Generally, the person asking the questions isn’t important. An exception would be questions gathered from similar audiences, such as:
- Financial advisors
- Home-office analysts at distribution partners
- Institutional investment consultants
iShares occasionally posts questions from blog readers and Seeking Alpha. That’s well-suited to direct ETF investors, perhaps less interesting to the retail and institutional communities.
The first three installments in this series covered: