When it comes to blogging for business it can be difficult to keep your enthusiasm levels high as time goes on. That first post or two might flow like the Nile but it’s easy to feel a drop off in inspiration. It’s important to mitigate this as the key to a good blog, aside from great content, is consistency – and it’s often a big commitment to keep this up. But that commitment reflects very positively on a business. As a result it’s important to do this.
Geoff Livingston, an established marketer, talks on the importance of consistency in blogging saying that consistency not only enables your business to gain influence in its sector but also promotes sales growth. He writes “A core aspect of sales training is building trust through consistency”. It’s clear that regularity is significant, but that’s not quite all you need for better business blogging.
There’s something about the subject matter itself that makes blogging for business a bit daunting and difficult for businesses and marketers alike. Anyone with a good grasp of language can write a fun humorous blog for their own site or go on a political diatribe about why taxation needs reform – but writing engaging and useful content for a business is a much finer art.
Let’s explore some tips that can make blogging for business less of a struggle, and make it much easier to maintain consistency – which will ultimately mean a better and more effective blog.
Know Your Audience
There’s not much point creating blog posts that aren’t useful for your audience. You’re not serving them well if you do this and the fact of the matter is that they will probably just look elsewhere for the information that they desire. Try and plan out what your audience wants and needs, this can make it a little bit easier to establishing what sort of topics and information your audience is after.
Are you an IT company specialising in networking? If so perhaps information on routers, adapters or emerging security technologies would be of interest to your audience. Are you a boutique beauty product company? Then perhaps you could give some tips on how to promote good skin health and link through to some relevant products you stock that might help too.
It’s all about making sure you know who you’re writing for, this way you can serve your audience more effectively which means they will come back for more. And what that ultimately means is the audience is more likely to use your service or buy your business’s products.
Planning A Blog: Make A Plan – Stick To It!
Whether you’re a professional digital marketer or you’re running a business yourself, a business blog can really benefit from a plan. This means not only will you be able to maintain consistency easier, as you will know exactly what it is you are scheduled to write about, but you can even write ahead of time and schedule blog entries should you wish.
When creating your own business blog plan, or commissioning one from a marketer, bear the following in mind;
- Keywords – If you have no experience with SEO then this might be a little bit intimidating, but you should use the free Keyword Planner tool from Google to find out what people are searching for. This way you can find a keyword for each blog title that gets good search volume. This is great for SEO as it allows you to structure your blogs around pre-existing user search patterns. If a site is already optimised for certain keywords you should have a list of them already, so you can incorporate those into your blog for an extra level of targeting.
- Titles – Select 1 or 2 keywords to target for each post, you don’t want to be spread too thin, and incorporate them into your blog post titles. Try and make them sound snappy and provocative, appealing to your audience. Darren Rowse says that communicating a benefit is important to entice people in, which is a good tip – so bear that in mind when writing. The idea is to incorporate your keywords in order to gain SEO value whilst drawing users in to reading the blog post itself.
- Description – When you’re planning your blog posts, it’s always a good idea to include a description and brief synopsis of what the post should cover. This is beneficial not only when writing the post yourself, as you have all the information you need already there, but also makes it much easier for the post to be written by another person should that be the case.
The frequency of posting all depends on each individual business. Generally once every two weeks is a good minimum, if you can do 1 a week or more then great! But it’s really about quality so make sure you’re not overstretching yourself in terms of what you’re able to deliver – as this may cause quality levels to slip.
Find The Best Content Management System For Your Business
Blogging through a content management system (CMS) is very simple. This makes the process of adding, editing and scheduling blog posts very easy – however there are many variants that might be better depending on the type of business. WordPress is very popular and simple to use, suited for most small businesses. It is flexible and allows you to do much of your own SEO, however security and compatibility issues are common.
There are others such as Joomla which is particularly good for high-volume blogs with a lot of articles – however it does not have the SEO capabilities that WordPress does. Another popular CMS is Drupal, which is particularly stable and flexible in its capabilities although it does have some disadvantages in that there are very few themes and plugins are often not free.
It all depends on what you want from your blog. Whatever CMS you use, make sure you make the most of it. This means completing all the technical details when posting to give the post the best chance of success. Tags, categories and SEO requirements should always be added as standard.
Love Your Service
This is a very general tip, but probably the most important when it comes to the actual writing of your blog post. When writing for business it is important to impart enthusiasm to the user. Aside from including useful information suited to your audience, you also need to show that you care a lot about what you’re doing and have a level of excitement to pass on to the user reading your post. That excitement is infectious and can really make a difference in making people want to come back for more.
Better Business, Better Blogging
The best way to make sure that you’re seen and have the right exposure is to maximise the effectiveness of your overall business, and making sure you have the right blogging practices in place is an important aspect of that.
Thanks for reading. Do you have any tips yourself? Please comment and let me know what you think.