Is there any business left that doesn’t understand the importance of starting a blog?
Probably not.
You know your business needs one, but that doesn’t mean you’ve done the blogging thing successfully just because you have one. You have to know how to do it the right way.
Here are five tips that are perfect for businesses that want to know how to get the most bang for every word on the blog.
Blog
Manage Email Lists
If you know you need a blog, then you know you need an email list, but did you know you should be maintaining more than one?
First, you should have an email strategy for outreach. In general, this list should focus on people who you actually want to get a response from, like journalists and industry connections.
Second, you need a separate email list for subscribers. This list needs to be separate, because the emails are very different. This second email list should receive blog and company updates, without the expectation of receiving a response.
Both lists are vital to any business, especially if you want to make sure your blog articles are making the most impact with the people who care about your posts.
Social Media
Social media is not the place for long-form blog articles, but that doesn’t mean the people on social media wouldn’t be interested in reading your latest article. You just have to make sure you do social media right.
There are a lot of great tips out there on how bloggers can get the most out of social media, but one of the best is knowing how to tease a blog article, then provide users with an easy way to access the blog. That might mean including some of the content on social media, with a link to follow, or pointing users to your website after posting a bunch of intriguing pictures.
High-Value Content
This tip may be the most important one on the list. That’s because many businesses make the mistake of thinking that any content is better than no content at all.
That’s definitely not the case.
The quality of your content is important. No one will want to come back to your blog if what you have to say doesn’t provide some kind of value.
Not to mention, bad content is bad for SEO. Google, and other search engines, are surprisingly smart. They can tell if your content is good or bad, and if it’s bad, it isn’t going to rank well on their search results pages. That means no one will be able to find it when they search the web.
A few tips for writing high-value content include:
- Do research before you start writing
- Don’t write and edit the article the same day
- Work on being more descriptive
- Inject personality into your content
Don’t have the time to create great content? Consider hiring a professional content writer to do all the hard work for you!
Keep Them Engaged
Outstanding content is a great way to keep readers engaged, but if you rely on content alone, your blog is going to get stale. You have to look for other ways to keep everyone interested.
The first, and arguably most important, consideration is how often you update your blog. Surprisingly, the answer is different for everyone.
Very large publishing companies may post thousands of articles a day. A lone blogger may post just once a week. The key is to find what works for you. Update as often as you can without compromising the quality of your content.
One way to boost your publishing schedule is to think about writing different kinds of blogs! A few ideas that will keep things interesting include:
- News and company updates
- Interviews with employees
- Articles from guest bloggers
- Highlighting philanthropic efforts
Know How to Use Keywords
Organic searches on search engines are a great way to get traffic for your blog, but you have to know how to use keywords. That means knowing how to integrate keywords seamlessly into your content, but it also means knowing where else to put keywords.
Keywords should be included in:
- Metadata
- Titles and headings
- The URL
- Alt tags
You shouldn’t be afraid to start a blog because you want to get everything perfect from the very beginning, but you shouldn’t assume that you’re doing everything right just because you have a blog either! With the tips on this list, you can get the most out of your blog, so it actually benefits your business.
