Small business blogging needs to be professional as well as appear it. Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog can keep the line of communication between you and potential customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and help increase your client base. It’s far from an exhaustive list but below are ten tips to remember when doing business blogging (i.e. blogging for business).
1 – Set Your Goals Early
In just about every guide you ever read it says “set your goals”; it might be a cliché but it’s true. With business blogging your most likely goal is to increase sales but other worthy goals can include:
* Communicating with your existing or potential clients.
* Relaying company news.
* Answering queries and questions.
* Providing guides for current customers.
* Providing a portal to everything useful related to your industry.
2 – Use SEO Friendly URLs And SEO Plugins
WordPress is an invaluable SEO tool. It is a dedicated Content Management System but, more than that, it has a team of frighteningly dedicated users that create themes, plugins, widgets, and more and then provide them for free of charge to other users. Among these tools are a great number of SEO related tools that can be used to determine your meta description and title tags.
3 – Consider Your Media Placement
Adding photos and illustrations, logos, videos, and other forms of media are great for reader engagement but you should consider each of your blog assets and place the most valuable and useful in the most prominent position. The quicker you can grab a reader’s attention, the more likely you will be to keep it for longer.
4 – Consider Your Ad Placement
The primary target of a business blog is not usually to make money directly through the blog itself. Therefore, the placing of third-party ads is not necessarily a good choice. However, you can add ads to your own company or service as well as partner websites. You can even add banners to specific categories, tags, or pages in your blog. Don’t overdo the number of banner ads and other distracting advertisements though and try to keep the interface clean and professional.
5 – Offer Your Readers The Chance To Pass You Around
Social sharing, Add me, share this, retweet, and email these functions should be provided to your users. When you post something useful and one of your readers shares it, it has the potential to go viral and create a lot of exposure for your blog and therefore your website and your business. This works especially well with highly unique content and can be text, audio, video…
6 – Keep Quality Content Coming
Try to set yourself a regular schedule but remember that it can be broken and it can be added to when necessary. If news breaks then post your own commentary on it. If you intersperse product reviews and articles that relate to your own business then try to schedule these. Make sure you post regularly, at the very least once a week, and spend some time getting involved in the community that builds up around your blog.
7 – Not Every Post Need Be An Advert
As long as you fill your blog with relevant, interesting, and well-written posts then visitors will take the time to look around, read a few posts, and even click the ads to your own site in order to see exactly what you have to offer. Not every single post needs to include multiple links to your website pages.
8 – Respond Where Responses Are Expected Or Deserved
Managing a blog is more than posting a missive of the week’s news every Friday. No matter how often you post you should spend some time interacting with the community that develops around your blog. Answer questions and queries, offer insight and provide a response where one is requested.
9 – Stuck For Inspiration? Immerse Yourself In Web 2.0
More specifically read forums and blogs, wikis and news sites related to your own industry. Look for those news stories, articles, and videos that you like the most and are relevant to your blog and write about them. Read the comments in your own blog and look through your analytics to determine the pages that are most popular with readers.
10 – Blogging Is Great For Business But Business Is Also Great For Blogging
Getting stuck into a blog and truly developing your blog community can be a great way to build traffic to your website and develop clients for your business. Reading related blogs and becoming an active member in social networks can help you find out what your readers want and deliver it frequently.
Hi Adesoji,
Very good point for businesses. On one hand many businesses began to blog, in fact so much so that now they are hiring special people just to carry on blogging. On the other hand you still have businesses that only have a website but they do not blog.
As you said it is very important to keep the website updated and what better way then have a blog with regular postings. Not only does that keep the customers interested it also gives them opportunity to “gently” sell some more items.
Enjoyed reading your post.
Cheers,
Dita
Thanks Dita