8 Tips To Ensure Your Corporate Blog Does The Business

Despite the fact I work primarily in email marketing, you’ll often hear me evangelizing about the power of the blog. I’m a great believer in the blog. A good blog should be the foundation of any content marketing strategy and will make your email marketing, social media marketing, online PR and SEO efforts so much easier. A carefully crafted blog will also help you position your organization as a thought leader within its own particular niche, reduce your paid search efforts, drive new leads and even shorten your sales cycle.

Of course at Vocus (where I am gainfully employed) we always try to eat our own dog food and blogging is ingrained into the culture with high traffic blogs employed across our brands. You might want to check us out and perhaps get some inspiration for your own strategy by visiting us at Vocus, iContact, PRWeb and North Social.

I’m not going to list the many benefits of blogging in this article. They can be found on previous posts here and here. Instead, I’d like to focus on what makes a great corporate blog by focusing on the many components that make a great blog.

8 Tips For Business Bloggers

1. Regularly updated, quality content: This really should go without saying. If you are leaving long periods of time between posts, you risk looking like you’ve lost interest – not a great first impression. The fact that Google loves fresh content should also inspire you to be more prolific. Just think how much traffic you can avoid paying for with some great content.
2. Killer headlines: Give your blog headlines as much thought as your body copy. The headline will often be the only thing people see (especially if promoted via social media). It should tell the full story and entice the reader to dig deeper into the post.
3. Humanize with images: Whenever possible try to include a relevant image alongside your blog post. Try to avoid clichéd stock photography. Instead, try and humanize your posts by featuring people (preferably your people or customers) involved in a task relating to the content.
4. Write for humans but with a thought to SEO: It’s the people who read your blog posts who will ultimately make the decision to buy your product or service. While SEO is important, overstuffing your blog posts with keywords and phrases might make it more visible to the search engines but unreadable to your audience and therefore rendering it not fit for purpose.
5. Always include a call to action: Don’t leave your readers hanging. Present them with a solid call to action. This could be a “Buy Now” message, an instruction to subscribe to your email list or just an invitation to leave a comment.
6. Link deep: Direct your readers to related articles on your blog. If they are not going to buy from you straight away, at the very least you can make sure they know that you are a useful source of quality information about your product or service.
7. Email Marketing Subscription Forms: Once you’ve found a reader, you’ll want them to come back time and time again. The easiest way of doing this is to include an email marketing subscription form on every page of your blog. Sell the benefits of email marketing subscription by offering exclusive content, special offers and regular news. Companies like iContact will give you everything you need to get started with your email marketing strategy.
8. Make it easy to share: The inclusion of highly visible social media share buttons, allowing your readers to share your content via Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+, etc., etc., will potentially help your content go viral.