Websites with blogs receive more traffic and more inbound links. In addition, they get more pages indexed by search engines. If you run a business, regardless of its size, you do need to have a blog. Starting a blog can bring multiple benefits to your business. But how do actually start a business blog?
Given below are top eight tips that you should keep on top of your mind when you want to start a business blog.
1. Define Business Goals
First, you should define the business goals that you want to accomplish by starting a blog. As a business, you may want to use a blog for generating online leads. You may want to increase the sales of your products. You may use the blog for driving traffic to your company website. There can be other business goals as well. When you know the goals, you can let them influence your blog’s content.
2. Locate the Target Audience
Who are you going to write for? This is, in fact, one of the most important questions that you need to answer while starting a business blog. Find out what kind of audience or group of people you seek. This is called ‘target audience profiling.’ You can expect to grow your business only when you really know what an ideal customer for your business looks like.
3. Create Remarkable Content
Always focus on producing remarkable content. One of the most important things that businesses need to understand is that a business blog is not just a means of talking about your products and services. Always try to keep your blog posts non-promotional. Publish industry reports, latest news, opinions. etc.
While creating content for your business blog, you should:
• Share helpful tips, advice and suggestions
• Keep readers well informed so they can make a good decision
• Offer links to valuable resources on the web
• Provide useful insights
• Write on buzz-worthy topics
• Publish content that’s highly shareable
4. Keep It Personal
A blog should always look like a blog. Even if you start it for business purpose, it should have a personal feel about it. When customers want to step into a relationship with your company, they want to see a real person who they can directly speak to. Readers want to hear your story. They want to know about your experiences. So, speak to them directly.
5. Optimize Content for Search Engines
It’s important to know the basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). When you start a business blog, you should also be aware of the techniques that you can use to attract traffic from major search engines. The page title, the Meta description and internal linking of posts are basics to get started with. In any case, you should never indulge in keyword stuffing, which is a bad SEO practice.
6. Provide Easy Blog Subscription Options
When you create a business blog, you should offer readers easy options for subscribing. When you publish valuable content on your business blog, readers will be compelled to subscribe. Therefore, it’s vital to offer them simple subscription options. Apart from giving readers an option for subscribing via email, also provide subscription via RSS. Easy subscription is a good tip to increase the number of blog subscribers.
7. Be Committed
The most important blog tip for businesses is to work with a lot of commitment. If you have started a blog to grow your business, you need to devote adequate time to keep it going. Update the blog on a regular basis while keeping readers hungry for more. If you can’t handle the blogging pressure yourself, it is also a good idea to include a few other people from among the staff. In any case, make sure you have an efficient blog editor to manage it all.
8. Don’t Hard-Sell
Another valuable business blogging tip is not to hard-sell to people. Today’s consumers are smarter than ever. They can sniff out a sales pitch quite easily. The more you try to sell, the less you’ll end up selling. Just focus on helping your readers. Solve their day-to-day problems.
Conclusion
If you start your business blog following the above-mentioned tips, you are sure to increase traffic instantly. A blog can be a benefit for almost every business. Besides being able to communicate information about your knowledge of the industry and sharing key elements of your services or products, having new content added regularly to your website is currently one of the factors in Google’s algorithm and can help your website show up higher in search results.
If writing isn’t one of your strong suits, or you simply don’t have time to do it properly, there are individuals and agencies that can help you manage your blog at a reasonable investment. Start your business blog and took your business to the next level.
