How Can You Boost Your Business Blog?

Your business blog can be a powerful tool.  It’s often potential customers’ first impression of your brand. It is the port of entry to your sales funnel.  Unlike your more static website, your blog is ever-changing and (hopefully!) up-to-the-minute and topical.  Your blog can make an enormous difference to your bottom line.  Are you using it to its full potential?

Your blog should be optimised to hit the top of the search engine results pages with the most appropriate keywords and phrases.  It should be visually appealing.  User experience is important to draw people further in than the most recent post.

Your blog should be easy to search for, with your posts tagged comprehensively with terms that make sense to new visitors.  It should focus on engaging and informing your readers, not selling to them.  Promoting your blog with your social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) is important. But that is all 101 stuff.  What can you do beyond the basics?

Next Level Blogging for Your Business

Here are a few things to double-check.  If you aren’t doing something on this list, try it.  It might be just the tweak your blog needs to draw in more sales leads and convert them.

• Timing is everything. Think carefully about what time zones your readers are in and what they are doing at different times of the day.  If you are targeting stay-at-home parents, try posting after school starts in the morning and after 9 pm.  Avoid posting around the time of day school gets out.  If your market is working office jobs, post at the start of lunch break time and after they’ve gotten home.  Are they commuting over a distance on public transportation?  That might be a good time to post.  Experiment and check your analytics.  And remember, you can post a link to your blog on social media a few times a day to reach more of your audience.

• Video works. According to Orbit Media’s annual study of blog trends, bloggers using video are reporting excellent results.  More and more blogs are using video.  You don’t have to shift to full-fledged vlogging.  But try including short video clips in your blog.  You can use video to demonstrate how something is done or to give a tour of your premises.  Be sure to include people.  That is one big strength of video – it brings things to life.  So include some real life in your videos.  Use them to show your blog followers who you and your team are.

• More is more. Sure, we’re all pressed for time.  That might make you think that people want shorter blogs.  Wrong!  It means that people don’t want to waste their time on short, fluffy sales blogs.  They want useful information.  They want an education, not five minutes of diversion.  It’s not about word count, but about the depth and detail of the information, you provide.  Blogging is moving toward longer, more in-depth posts with less frequency.  You don’t need to blog daily.  Weekly or monthly does it.  Think of the slow food movement.  People want to sit down and really savour what they are getting instead of downing some junk quickly.

What Drives the Trends?

The real root of a successful business blog is simple.  It is user experience.  All of these things share that root.  You need to know what your target audience wants.  You need to know what they want from your products and services, and in order to tell them how you can meet their needs, you need to know what they want to know, how they want to learn it and when they prefer to get that information.  The more you can empathise with your market, the more effectively you can reach them and sell to them.

So pay attention to the trends, but think about what drives them.  Think about how your audience does and doesn’t fit with the current trends in digital marketing.  That insight is what will boost your business blog and ultimately your bottom line.

Blog Management Solutions