While having a blog for your business is important, there are certain basic guidelines you should follow to ensure your business’ blog has its maximum impact, and that you’re not just blogging by the seat-of-your-pants but rather with a strategy in place. This will help you connect with potential and existing customers in an engaging way that also answers their questions.
Here are six basic business blogging tips to help you build a great blog.
1. Define your blogging goals
Before you start blogging, it is important to establish the goals you want your business blog to achieve for you. This will help you develop a content strategy by showing you which areas to focus on. In order to define the goals of your blog you need to be able to answer the question, “why are you blogging?” This could be for a number of reasons that include:
- Driving foot traffic to your business
- Increasing sales or generating leads
- Educating prospects and customers on your business
- Giving a behind-the-scenes look
- Attracting prospects from outside your locality
- Expressing brand identity
A good blog content strategy will contain two or three of these goals in order for it to be efficient and focused. Another important thing to remember is that the more specific you are with your goals, the better.
2. Blog consistently
It is important to regularly add fresh content to your blog in order for it and your business to appear active, and helps your business’ website rank higher in search results. Although there are no clearly defined rules for how often you should post new content on your business blog, depending on what your goals are, there are some business blogging tips regarding frequency.
According to HubSpot, if the main aim of your business blog is to increase organic traffic to your website, then you will need to post frequently – translating into about 3-4 times a week for a small business. On the other hand, if you are aiming to create awareness around your small business, posting once or twice a week is enough.
3. Perform keyword research
While blogging about topics related to your business is an obvious step, it is also important for your content to target what people are searching for in order to maximise its reach. This can be done with keyword research, which helps you identify these search terms.
The ideal keyphrase has a high search volume, low competition and is relevant to your business. By identifying and incorporating these keywords in the title and body of your blog posts, your business blog will rank higher in their search results and generate more traffic.
4. Aim for ideal blog post lengths
While you shouldn’t write a post for your business blog with only a word count in mind, there are ideal blog post lengths if you are trying to generate traffic for your website, or leads. The most recent numbers indicate that for search engine optimisation, the ideal blog post length is between 2100 and 2400 words, while for lead generation the ideal post length is about 2500 words.
Of course, there are different blog post types and these also have different ideal lengths. For example, blog posts that answer questions should only be between 1300 and 1700 words, while how-to blog posts should be between 1700 and 2100 words.
While these ideal lengths will help your content perform better in search results, it is possible to create engaging content that strays outside of these numbers if it is high quality, informative, and contains relevant keywords that makes it easy for your audience to find and read.
5. Include visual elements
Visual elements such as images or video make your page more engaging to readers and help capture short attention spans. Research has shown that when given information paired with visuals, people tend to retain 65% of it, whereas only 10% of the information given is retained if it isn’t accompanied by visual elements.
Visual elements such as infographics or charts in a blog post can lead to users spending more time reading your blog and remembering its contents.
6. Create a blog content calendar
In order to ensure that your posts are on track and published on time, you need a content calendar. Content calendars give you an overview of what needs to be done and when it needs to be done, helping you maintain a consistent blogging schedule.
Through the use of a content calendar, you will be able to transform your content strategy into actionable posts with measurable goals, and ensure that you hit the keywords you’ve identified regularly.
The birdseye view content calendars provide, also help you avoid writer’s block by giving you a structure to follow and makes consistent blogging less overwhelming by helping you visualise what needs to be done.
While all these business blogging tips may seem a bit overwhelming, the truth is that implementing them will help you develop a framework for your blog ensuring that your content is relevant and reaches your target audience.
Give them a try to see the positive effects they have on your blog and business.
