Blogging is a conversation, not a code.
Mike Butcher, Editor, TechCrunch
Managing a business blog is an excellent way to create valuable content for your clients. Blog posts can be informative and instructional; they show your clients that you know your stuff within your niche of operations. Some business blogs occasinally use embedded infographics and video media to help attract attention, which makes them extremely effective for the purposes of SEO.
They also demonstrate to the customer that the quality of their experience is important to you. If you sell vacuum cleaners, and you post blogs about how to extend the lifespan of your vacuum cleaners, you’re stretching out the value of their dollar. If you sell a service, you can provide suggestions for when your service may or may not be necessary.
Here are five tips on how to write a successful business blog post for your business—one that conveys value to your clients, while boosting your authority with the search engines.
Become a real people person! Even if you are already, many professionals maintain a blogging style that may be a little too formal. Blogging is a less formal means of communication, by definition, than what many business owners are accustomed to. A certain amount of distance and decorum is called for, but try expressing yourself as the human face of your enterprise. Create a style to which your clients can easily relate. The fundamental steps for developing a style include:
This is cast almost as an aside: if you’re going to be putting content on your site, you might as well make it work for you! This includes ensuring that Google, Bing, and the other major search engines take notice of you, by engaging in effective SEO practices. Seek out effective keywords in areas where you can be competitive. This shouldn’t be the primary selling point of your business blog: you want it to relate to your clients, so don’t sacrifice that conversational tone while you’re ensuring optimal keyword saturation levels!
One of the best things you can do to help ensure optimal use of on-page SEO, without sacrificing that informal, conversational tone, is to partner with an SEO agency. You will gain access to tools and information which can help you to engage the search engines most effectively, automating many of your optimization concerns. Using optimal keywords at just the right level of saturation will become much easier. allowing more of your efforts to be focused on writing style and interaction with your readers.
More on Partnering with an SEO Agency: What Is a Google Trusted Partner?
Writing and posting a business blog is an important part of the job, but it’s far from being the whole of it. Now that you’ve got valuable content out there, it’s time to share it with the rest of the internet! Link to your content in social media, and on content-based platforms such as Reddit and Digg. The moment you produce a new blog post, Tweet it; you might benefit from the automatic retweeting of an important hashtag. Look at what other organizations within your industry are using for social media, and focus on platforms which are popular—without discounting big networks like Twitter and Facebook!
There’s a lot of advice out there about word count. Some of it is particular to different types of blogs. For example, a technical blog—one that is meant to be read by people with relevant experience, and to be sourced by experts in the field—may be longer than average. Curated blogs are obviously much shorter. If your goal is to draw in a human audience, or to generate interactive discussion, you want a blog to average out at between 300 and 750 words long; your readers will be scanning it for that initial impression of value, and a piece that’s hundreds of words longer than expected runs the risk of turning them off. Generally, longer and more detailed posts get more shares, and are better for on-page SEO; they also receive fewer comments, and don’t generate a lot of on-site discussion.
Google Analytics is a highly popular free tool for monitoring website performance. It takes minutes to sign up for and install (and that “free” thing is always nice, but if you’re interested, Google does offer a more powerful platform). Use this, or another popular analytics tool to monitor the performance of your business blog, collecting actionable intelligence. Depending upon the results, you may want to try modifying your style, or promoting your blogs through a different medium. The end result—a sound, long-term content marketing strategy that results in gradual, steady gains—is always worth the trouble!