We’ve already looked at the question of “why blog?”
Now you’re ready to get your business blog up and running to generate some traffic for your site – but you’re unsure how to do it.
A well-crafted effective blogging can do a lot for your business, expressing its personality, establishing it as an expert in the field, and- best of all – generating leads.
Even better, it’s a cost-effective way to achieve all these things while having complete control over the message you send out.
Take a look at our tips on how to use blogging effectively for your business.
Understand Blog writing process
In order to do effective blogging, you must first understand blog writing process.
You will learn to improve your blog writing process over the time. I have created a detailed infographic to help you to start with.
Create good content
Cold fact: content is the most important aspect of blogging. If you don’t have good, compelling, well-written content that people want to look at, you will have nothing.
The key to business blog writing is to be engaging and conversational while still maintaining a professional tone. But “content” doesn’t just mean writing – in fact, the visual is extremely important in internet communication.
Pictures and videos are great tools and are an engaging way to get relevant information across. Plus they make great material for social media users to link to.
Present it nicely
Once you have the quality material, how you lay it out makes a real difference.
Big slabs of text can be off-putting for readers, so make the content more accessible with headers and bullet points.
Snappy headlines are important to draw readers in and create a “clickable” quality that encourages social media sharing.
Images are also essential for breaking up text, drawing the eye in and providing further interest to your post.
Make sure posts are timely
You don’t have to post every day – in fact, if you post just for the sake of posting, you can turn people off and lose followers, fast.
It’s often more effective to ensure posts are targeted and relevant rather than frequent. However, you do need to post regularly to maintain reader interest and engagement; if posts drop off, so do your readers, but regular posts keep them checking back for new content or – even better – they’ll subscribe.
It’s also important to keep posts current – if a pertinent topic or event pops up, write about it right away.
If you leave it for two weeks, everyone will have moved on by the time you publish and they won’t be clicking on your “old hat” post.
Encourage comments and other audience interaction
For a business, social media is about encouraging public conversations, not delivering monologues.
Use metrics to monitor your posts to see what gets people’s attention and why, so you can build on successful posts.
Include calls-to-action in your content such as “what do you think? Let us know in the comments!”
Also, make it easy to share posts on other forms of social media – this increases your reader base, helps create beneficial links and generates buzz. But don’t treat posts as set-and-forget – make sure you check back regularly so you can reply to any comments that require a response.
If you don’t, it looks like you don’t care about your audience.
Make it professional
This may seem obvious, but it’s important to remember that business blogs serve a totally different purpose from personal ones.
Posts need to be focused and relevant to your industry, as well as entertaining.
Also, you must make sure you spelling and grammar are impeccable. Any whiff of amateurism or shonkiness will send a bad impression of your business. In this way, a bad blog can do active damage to your company brand.
Also, though the company owner is clearly the best-informed person about their own business, they may not necessarily be a skilled writer.
Blog writing may be boring and torturous for existing company employees, and take too much time away from their everyday duties.
If this is the case, talk to ZOFELA about our professional blog writing service that can boost your social profile and reader engagement. You’ll be glad you did!
