A business blog can be a superb addition to a company’s digital strategy. A blog is simple to set up, easy to maintain and allows your company to disclose the latest developments both within the industry and your business. A good blog will foster the right environment to court customer engagement, by providing enough viewer fodder to keep your clients coming back for more.
To make your business blog an effective one, consider entertaining the following suggestions:
1. Know Your Customers – Know Your Content. Your blog needs a strategy and plan in much the same way as your business. Ask yourself, who are your main clients and leads? What kind of information would they want from your blog aside from the great new products and services you have in the pipeline. The more you understand your customers needs, the more targeted you can make the blog tickle their fancy.
2. Promote Your Blog. Without anyone to read it, your blog may as well not exist. Publicize your blog in as many ways as possible. Link to it on your main site as well as your various social media domains. Discreetly promote it in the forums. Understand the basics of using keywords intelligently so that your site is awarded respectable SEO positions for your main money keywords. You can even promote word of mouth awareness about your blog, or add the details on business cards and invoices.
3. Allow For Engagement. A blog should be about engagement and interaction. If using WordPress, you can easily facilitate your blog with a comments feature so your visitors can discuss articles and posts. It’s possible to moderate the comments to weed out potential troublemakers before the comment is listed, and there are anti spam plugins too, to avoid bots posting garbage on the comments section. Good engagement encourages more good engagement – when people see a flurry of discussion and comments on your articles, it gives your blog a certain pizazz. Viewers are more likely to take the information more seriously, and perhaps pop in with a comment of their own.
4. Focus On Quality. If you’re committing to a business blog, be sure to produce only pedigree content. The content you publish online is a reflection of your own business – creating sub par content is tantamount to giving your clients a slap in the face.
5. Make Your Business Blog Easy To Read & Navigate. There are multiple issues to get right here. First, a good blog template where the presentation should match that of your main site and business. Include some nice visuals and videos where you can, and offer the text in bite-sized chunks.
6. Mobile Browser Compatibility. Given that we’re rapidly surging towards a 50/50 internet access share between desktops and mobiles, your blog should be clean and crisp when browsed via mobile devices.
7. Allow Your Other Online Media To Mingle With Your Blog. Your blog is at its core a promotion tool. Therefore, add your links to social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. Include an opt in page for your newsletter, preferably with a free gift to improve sign up conversions.
8. Organize Your Blog Content In A Clear And Neat Way. Blogs are designed for those with less than stellar technical skills. It’s not difficult to add a search box to your blog – and to organize your content in a way that makes sense, and is easy for viewers to find.