3 Tips for Business Blogging

A blog can give your business a fantastic boost online.  With the right approach, blogging can draw in new potential customers with strong search engine optimization.  You can attract people who have never heard of your company but are your ideal target market. Once they are there, you have the chance to make a great first impression.  But how?  How can you really make your brand’s blog work for you and nudge those visitors to convert to paying customers?

First, a few words on what not to do are in order.  While your blog is a powerful platform to attract potential customers and convince them that your brand is the one to best meet their needs, you shouldn’t actually use your blog directly for sales.  That turns people off.  People using search engines to solve a problem are first looking for information, and if they get a hard sell instead, they will click away in seconds.

Think of it this way.  In a bricks and mortar shop, you wouldn’t expect a salesperson to approach you waving a product and suggesting you buy it.  Good sales staff know to keep their first approach low-key and helpful.  They’ll introduce themselves and ask if you have any questions, then invite you to approach them if you think of more questions or require any assistance.  Your blog needs to take a similar, but not identical, approach.

Power Up Your Blog

So what should you do to make your business blog more powerful?  Here are three important steps to creating an effective blog.

1. Know Your Audience. This is critical for all aspects of digital marketing, but to successfully blog it is essential. You need to understand what your audience needs, what problems they want to solve and how they feel about them.  Beyond that, you need to understand how formal or casual your tone should be to reach them, what makes them uncomfortable and what makes them laugh.  Most of all, you need to know what motivates them and how it connects to what you are selling.
2. Optimize Your Blog Content. When you know your audience and what problem or issue they want information about, you can successfully optimize your blog with relevant keywords. Consider whether or not localized keywords are important.  If you are bricks and mortar shop that people will actually go to, they are.  But if you are selling exclusively online, they might not be… unless your location is part of your brand identity.
3. Keep It Fresh. Updating your blog regularly shows people you are paying attention – both to them and to your field. Your blog can position you as an expert, and to achieve that you have to be on top of current trends.  Keeping your blog fresh isn’t just about posting regularly, although that is important.  It’s also about addressing the newest developments in your industry and your audience’s lives.

Part of your blogging practice should be to watch your analytics and see what works and what doesn’t.  You should critique every post after it has been online a couple of days and see how you can make the next one stronger.  Blogging, like all aspects of digital marketing, is always changing so you can never sit back thinking you have the perfect formula.