Growing a business is no simple feat, but it’s one that can be made much easier with a successful blog. The benefits of business blogging are many and varied. It can start a conversation between you and your audience, establish you as an expert in your industry, and, of course, drive traffic to your website, thus attracting new customers and boosting sales. However, none of this is possible if your site is stagnant, tired, or not reaching your audience. With that in mind, here are seven things that you can do to improve your business blog.
- Ditch The “Blog” Label
While a blog can help to drive traffic to your site, it also gives those already there a reason to return. Unfortunately, this may not be the case if you label your blog as a blog. Most of your site visitors will assume that this content would be full of product and general company updates, which is something that may not be of interest to them. Calling this tab “How-To Guides”, “Articles”, or something similar, however, may capture their interest and push them to click.
- Follow A Consistent Schedule
A perfect blogging streak isn’t necessary for success, but you should try to be consistent. Posting multiple blog articles in the space of a week, and then nothing for months on end could cause your blog to go stale and you to lose readers. For this reason, you should spread these posts out a little. Establishing a schedule can help to keep you consistent. If you’re struggling for ideas, look back at your most popular content and see if there is any way to repurpose it.
- Address Questions From Customers
Business blogs need to be entertaining, but also informative. By answering the questions of your customers, you can kill two birds with one stone. Because of this, you should add a contact form to your site and use a service, like the Jekyll contact form backend, to start receiving submissions. You should also pay attention to what is said in the comments and make a note of any topics or queries that are frequently mentioned. This helps you to come up with content.
- Break Up The Content
Humans have incredibly short attention spans. If we don’t engage with a page in a few seconds, it probably won’t happen. For this reason, you must make your content as eye-catching as possible. Adding lots of text is not the way to go about this. A massive wall of text is daunting, distracting, and confusing to read. To remedy this, you should break up your content with images and graphs. You should also highlight key points by adding subheadings and bullet points.
- Utilize Social Media Platforms
Just like with products, once you’ve created your content, you need to promote it. Social media is an effective tool for this purpose. Tweet, share, and post your blog articles on any social media platforms that your company uses so that all of your followers know that it there to read. You should also add social sharing buttons to your blog and keep all of your social media posts public. This allows your readers and followers to share your content too, increasing its visibility.
- Converse In The Comment
At the end of each of your blog posts, you should write a sentence or paragraph encouraging your audience to ask a question or share their opinions. When they do, you must make sure that you respond to every one. This builds a rapport between you and your audience, converting them from casual readers to loyal ones and eventually customers. The more comments you have on the site, the more legitimate it looks to newcomers too, which will help to increase the site traffic.
- Inject Your Own Personality
No one wants to shop from a company that is only out to help themselves. Because of this, you must show your audience that yours is more than just a profit-seeking machine. Although it’s best to keep your political views, personal problems, and other risky topics off your site, there’s nothing wrong with injecting a little personality into your posts. Consumers like to know that there are real people behind business blogs, so let them know about the things important to you.
Business blogging is just as relevant today as it ever has been. It has a myriad of benefits, with very few drawbacks to consider. To ensure that your site is a success, follow the simple advice above.