10 Ways Businesses Can Blog Better

10 Ways Businesses Can Blog Better

What makes a business blog good; what makes it bad? We take a quick look at 10 ways any business can (and should) improve their blogs with minimal time and effort. After all, a blog is an online asset and investment in your brand’s future.

1. Ditch the Promotion

Too many businesses headline their content with, “This product changes lives!” and other overtly promotional titles. If people want to learn how a product or service beats out the competition or what a company does, they’ll read a review or press release.

Keep the promotion to a minimum and only blog about yourself when you have a major announcement.

2. Engage With Topics

The trick to better business blogging is to find topics that are worth talking about. “But how do I do that?” you may ask. Well, here are a few tips:

• Look at what the competition is doing and do it better.
• Find trending news articles and write commentary from a business’ point of view.
• Choose topics that are semi-related to your services and products.

3. Brevity Wins

There’s no need to publish 5,000-word posts. To start with, doing so takes time and ruins the quality and conciseness of quality posts. Instead, break large topics into manageable chunks and keep them between 400 and 600 words.

4. Make Them Skim

A “skimmable” post is one with quick points, lists, and easy to scan and comprehend facts. Formatting Top 10s, How-To articles, and similar posts is easy when you have a good topic. This increases readability and allows inpatient readers to remember the cliff notes.

5. Use Multimedia

Inject pictures, videos, and infographics into your posts whenever possible. They need to be relevant, of course, and actively add to the content. Visuals take the monotony out of reading and give blogs substance.

6. Authoritative Linking

Use links to outside resources to prove that you know what you’re talking about. Too often, businesses fear this will take visitors away from their sites. Taking a deeper look, however, we can see how outbound links increase inbound traffic and show that a blogger has done his or her research beforehand.

7. The Call-to-Action

Every business-sponsored blog should incorporate a call-to-action at the end of a blog. This is a small section that explains how you, the business, can help readers solve the topic (usually a problem or question). Add a link to your site, a phone number, and keep it short.

8. Drop the Formalities

It’s a blog, not a press release. Use tight language but don’t fall into jargon-heavy, press release-style diction that bores readers after the first sentence. Try a conversational tone on for size and talk directly to the reader, not the customer.

9. Query Feedback

Check up on how each post does in terms of visits and social shares. Next, you can ask your followers what they think of particular types of content. Combined, these investigations can help you write topics that are better received and reach more readers.

10. Revise

For the love of blog…always revise your posts. Small spelling and grammar errors make your posts look amateurish and the opposite of professional. At Grammar Chic, Inc. we specialize in editing and helping whip business blogs into respectable shape. Have questions? Let us know at 803-831-7444