The Best Practices of Business Blogging
Posted on Thu, Feb 14, 2013
The online journals of the early days have evolved now into web logs or blogs. Nowadays, blogs have become indispensable marketing tools for online businesses. According to Hubspot’s survey, businesses that blogs at least twice a week get more customers.
The goal of business blogging is different and distinct from those blogs for media outlets. The latter is more about getting impressions and clicks while blogging for online business is aimed at generating traffic and leads. For inbound marketing, blogging is an indispensable marketing strategy to increase and boost traffic and leads into the marketing funnel.
For having different goals, business blogs also have distinctive practices as compare to personal and media blogs. Some of the key principles of personal and media blogs are true for business blogging. The challenge is how to apply the art of business blogging to create interesting, relevant and compelling content for the reader.
No doubt, anyone can blog but not everyone can become a good blogger. So, if you want to bring out the best of your company blogging then learn and apply these best practices of the art of business blogging!
Use Appropriate Keywords
Keywords are keys to rank in the search engines. Think of the words that your target market is using when searching for you. Put them in your title and content’s body. Use them as meta tags, as hyperlinks, and as tags.
Create Catchy Headlines
A catchy title goes a long way. More than anything else, a headline will get read, so you need to make sure that headline can hook audience’s attention and compel them to read on. To have more impact consider using “best of”, “how to” and “top tips”.
Create Compelling Content
Attracting and pulling prospects is the content strategy of inbound marketing. Always think of your target audience or marketing persona when creating content. Create quality, helpful, informative and relevant content for them. Give them your best content and they will keep on coming back to your site.
Break Up the Text; Use Bullets, Italics and Bold
Audiences are turned-off when they see long or large blocks of content. So break you text and make your paragraphs shorter and more digestible. Use short and punchy sentences in the first few lines to hook your audience.
Bullets, italics and bold fonts can make your content easier to read. It can also help emphasize specific words you want to retain in your readers’ mind.
Build Links
Links add depth and make your content credible. Use links to give credit to your sources. But refrain from using too many links for it might compromise your credibility and originality. It might also cause for misinterpretation of your post as spam. Two to three back links to previous posts and your website are fine.
Blog Regularly
Surveys say that businesses that blogs at least twice a week get more customers. Post compelling, helpful, interesting and relevant content for your audience. You get more readers and followers when you post regularly. It will also help your ranking in the search engines.
Embed Picture That Speaks Thousand Words
A picture speaks a thousand words. It instantly gives insights and helps grab the attention of the readers. Add at least one or two (but not too many) relevant and interesting images as it helps your readers better understand the content. Always use keywords in the image alt attribute for it helps search engines to analyze your content and improve your ranking. Be careful not to keyword stuff and be descriptive of the image.
Ask for and Respond to Comments
Pose a question on your blog. This is to encourage comments and trigger conversations towards building relationships and earning trust. Don’t ignore or leave comments unattended. Respond to every comment even if it’s negative. A simple thanks will do and it helps develop conversations.
Promote and share to Social Media
You create content because you want many people to read it. Promote your blogs in the social media. Make your content easier to share on the web by including social widgets next to your blog.
These are the best practices we learned from our and others business blogging experience. We love to share these experiences so that more bloggers will become effective and more and more interesting and quality blogs will be produced. If you have something to add to these best practices then help others by sharing your thoughts.
