A lot of businesses take blogging way too casually or flippantly. It’s something that you need to take seriously. It needs to serve your business to the best of its ability. So don’t be tempted to cut corners when it comes to your blog. Here are the ways you can make sure you take a more professional and efficacious approach.
Getting set up
There is a lot more to think about when it comes to the setup than you might assume. A lot of business owners will make the mistake of taking the easiest route possible here. They’ll head over to Blogger, enter some contact details, and start blogging away using whatever template takes their fancy. This might be a very good approach if you’re making a personal blog, but it’s probably not the approach you want your business to be taking.
You need to choose a good platform on which to build this blog. Ideally, you should be adding a WordPress blog to your main business site. This lets you manage the content of the blog section of that website. You also need to think about the URL and the website design. This will help you avoid a situation where your blog looks indistinguishable from any other business blog.
Taking the professional approach
Anyone who wants to create a blog that will actually get followers is going to have to be consistent in their approach. A lot of people who have a blog simply as a pastime will just upload a post whenever they feel like it. This may end up being daily. It might be twice a week. It could even be twice a month. Heck, I’ve seen blogs that the owner only updates maybe once a year.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that this simply isn’t going to cut it for your business. You need to take a very professional and consistent approach. You need to come up with a consistent update schedule. The process of creating content, writing drafts, proofreading and editing, and uploading the content on time should be made formal, with tasks designated to those best able to do them.
Informative and entertaining
A business blog isn’t there to simply to entertain. The people who are going to be following your blog are going to want specific information regarding your business and the industry at large. Simply uploading images and memes and jokes and random, humorous thoughts about political events probably isn’t going to impress your audience for very long. They’ll soon wonder if you’ve gotten a teenager to run your blog. Your priority should be informing. Make sure your posts are concise and rich with information.
This being said, you shouldn’t assume that you should just upload bone-dry content. Content can be both entertaining and informative. You should put a priority on learning how to make such blog posts fun to read. This is a more subtle approach than some may think. It’s not about suddenly dropping jokes and images in the middle of informative posts. It’s about developing a style and tone of voice that gives your content real character.
Thinking about community
Did you think that it was enough to just upload blogs and reel in the hits? Once the post has been uploaded, your job isn’t quite over yet. It’s best that you try to really connect with your audience. You should let them have a voice. Most bloggers will do this by including a comment section on their blogs. This isn’t a place that’s just there so people can lavish praise on your blogs while you work on your next post. You should be engaging with the people who are writing these comments.
If you don’t want to do it this way, then you should be putting some focus onto social media. You can engage with your readers on Twitter. When you share the post over Twitter, followers may sub-tweet you on the subject. Be sure to pay attention and respond whenever appropriate, even if it’s just a simple thank you for a compliment.
Be my guest
It shouldn’t be news to you that there are some seriously big blogs out there. It’s important to remember that bloggers aren’t all out to destroy each other so that there’s no more competition. On the contrary: many bloggers are happy to help one another. And this can work to your great benefit. There’s a certain area of the blogging world that can result in a mutually beneficial exchange between bloggers. I’m talking, of course, about guest blogging.
A lot of blog owners would balk at the idea of sharing their content with anyone. Writing a post that’s just going to end up on another blog almost seems self-defeating. But it can actually be an amazing way to get more people to your blog. What you’re essentially doing is marketing yourself by sharing a fantastic piece of content on a bigger site than your own, or one with a niche that you’d like to tap into. This is something that any serious blogger should be looking into. Get yourself a list of guest post sites to get started.
Growth
Your blog can never really be big enough. A blog is an incredible way of attracting people to your business. The more readers you have, the more eyes you’re going to have on your products and services. So how exactly do you go about growing your blog? Well, all of the above will help you when it comes to expanding readership. But your next step might be outsourcing.
By getting outside help with content idea generation, team accountability, analytics, SEO, and scheduling, you’ll free yourself up to perform any task you can only do best when it’s in-house. This is a great way of expanding your readership potential without paying for full-time employees. Of course, you have to make sure that your website can actually handle all those visitors. If your website doesn’t have enough bandwidth to have a few thousand visitors, then you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. So if you’re looking to grow your blog, make sure your blog actually has room to grow!
