7 Tips for a Great Business Blog

How to create a business blog that brings home the bacon…

Depending which study you read, you’ll discover that adding a blog page to your business website can increase website traffic by as much as 55 percent.
Which is all well and good. But what do you actually do with a business blog once you’ve got one?
Follow these top tips and you could see your SEO rankings and sales go up…
1. Pick a topic
There are as many different topics for blogs around the world as there are grains of sand in the Sahara. However, if you’re the CEO of a plumbing company, you can bet your bottom dollar that your readers won’t want to read about the recipes you make for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or the outfit you’re rocking up to work in.
When deciding on a relevant topic for your blog, you should ask yourself why you setup your business in the first place. Go beyond the obvious – to make money – to the passion that led you into your field at the very start.
If you’re a cycling company, for example, there’s a good chance you didn’t set up your business simply because you wanted to sell bikes. Instead, you probably got into your industry because you loved to cycle.
This passion should inform the content of your blog. What is it you love about cycling? Is there a special route that you love that you can share with your readers? Is there an image you took recently while taking a break on a ride? Do you know a cycling fitness expert who you can interview to share his insight with readers?
2. Solve problems
Blogs that solve problems get a lot of engagement. Remember that you are writing your blog for your readers and there’s a good chance they have come to your site for advice or guidance. Invest some time into creating problem solving articles that really hit the nail of the head. Add videos if you can and guide your readers through issues they may face step by step.
3. Be consistent
It’s no use blogging every day for the first month then losing momentum. Be realistic about how many blog posts you can produce in a week. If it’s only one post, then just write one post. Then publish your content at a similar time and day every week, so your readers come to know they can rely on you.
4. Avoid the hard sell
No one reads blogs to be pushed into a sale. Avoid posting blog posts like ‘Buy this now’. If you want to showcase your products on your blog, do it in a way that gives the reader additional information and insight to what’s available on your website. Add a video and extra images if possible.
5. Do your research
You can preempt the sort of topics your readers want to find more about by doing a bit of research. Quora is a great tool for this. You can search Quora to find out what questions people invested in your industry are asking. So, if you’re the bike shop owner, you could search for ‘cycling’ in the Q and A area of the site and you’ll discover that people are asking things like What is the best App for Cycling and Is Cycling Better for you than Running.
Google Adwords is also a good tool for getting to know what people in your field are most interested in. Using this service, you can see how popular certain keywords are in the search engines and plan your content – and your blog titles in particular – based on this.
6. Do some news-jacking
News-jacking is simply taking a topic that’s hot in the news or social media sphere and writing about it. Don’t forget to share your posts on social media to keep the conversation going.
7. Experiment with format
Once you’ve got your topic focus right, you can start to experiment with varying your format. Include Q and As into your blog, try a few infographics, and even brave a podcast or webinar.
For more information on making your social media work for you, read this blog.