If your business doesn’t have a blog yet, it should be the next thing on your to-do list. Starting a professional blog is a cheap way to promote your business, and if you do it right it can lead more clients, more work, and more profits.
So how do you ensure that your business blog is as successful as it can be? Here are a few tips to lead you in the right direction.
Set a clear purpose
A blog is a long-term commitment if you want it to be successful, so before you start you need to know what you hope to get out of it. If your sole reason is just to get more clients, then it’s a bit vague. A blog’s purpose is different from a business goal; business goals are focused on helping you drive up sales and client traffic, whereas blogs are more reader-centred, thus they have to engage your online readers. You need to know how you want to engage with readers, even if they don’t end up buying anything from you? Do you want to educate people on a topic you know a lot about? Do you want to demonstrate the benefits of a service you offer? Or do you want to sell them something they don’t know they need?
Have your purpose clear in your mind every time you update your blog.
Make your blog Google-friendly
As your blog is part of a larger marketing strategy to drive up business, you want to make sure it can be easily found online. Google suggests using keywords in the URL, making site navigation easy, and avoiding long URLs as much as possible. Google also uses links and backlinks to determine successful websites, so if many reputable websites link back to your blog it is an indication of good quality.
Update consistently
Whether you post a new article weekly or every day, you stand a better chance of winning over your readers if you update your blog consistently. In fact, once your regular readers catch on to when your usual post date is, you’ll find that this is the day your get the most web traffic. If you have trouble coming up with topics to write about when you’re due to update your blog, you might benefit from coming up with a list of topics a few weeks in advance to help you plan ahead. Alternatively, you can stay updated with news within your industry and make some personal comments in response.
Find your niche
You might know a lot about several different topics, but that doesn’t mean you should write about all of them. In order to achieve your goals and nurture a readership, you need to focus on a single topic and establish yourself as an expert.
One obstacle you may find here is setting yourself apart from other online blogs that cover the same topic. The best thing you can do is choose your expert topic, research what the competition is doing, and try to do it ten times better.
An exception to this rule is to go with a subject that’s relevant to only a few people. It will be tough at first, but once those people find you, you’re going to have a secure and loyal readership.
Connect with your readers
The beauty of the internet is that we don’t have to know people personally to strike up a conversation. Once your readers know about you, make yourself approachable by responding to their comments on your posts, or setting up a social media account specifically for your business. By doing this, you are opening up a dialogue between yourself and your readers, and you can then start to address their problems in your posts.
If you notice that a number of them want to know more about a specific subject within your specialty topic, you can plan a post around that interest. You can also answer a question that keeps popping up in the comments.
The more you make yourself useful to your readers, the more they will come to value your opinion and consider you an expert in your field. Once that happens, your readers could even become customers.
Be willing to go off topic
Once you have an established readership, you can have a bit more freedom to experiment and go off topic; this might not always be popular, but it doesn’t hurt to try. A willingness to introduce new topics shows that you can think creatively, that you’re knowledgeable about other topics, or that you’re eager to learn more about something new. You could even take suggestions from your readers and give them a short acknowledgement somewhere in the article.
Have guest posts
Guest blogging can become a useful marketing tool for your business. Not only will your guest blogger likely be a contact from your industry, but they will have their own following, and will promote your business and your blog to their own readers. Your readers, in turn, may search for your guest’s website and start regularly following their updates.
Another benefit of a guest blogger is that they will know different things about the same topic, so you’re learning something new alongside your readers. Additionally, you may know things about your topic that your guest doesn’t know, so you could extend an offer to write a guest post for their blog.
Finally, guest posts can give you a short break from updating, and inspire you with fresh ideas.
Don’t be afraid to get a little personal
There’s a reason you started your business in the first place. You had a passion for something, or there were extenuating circumstances that pushed you in a certain direction.
As your blog becomes more successful, your readers will come to know you on certain level, so why not share little parts of your history with them (if you feel comfortable). An anecdotal post can show a different side of you and even attract a new type of reader.
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