3 TIPS FOR BUSINESS BLOGGING

A business’s blog is one of the first places I go to see what the business is all about. A blog sheds light on:

• What the business believes in
• What they hold as important
• What their area of expertise is
• Who they serve
• How much effort they put into serving their audience

You might be saying to yourself, But that’s what the About page is for! And yes, you do learn a lot about a business from their “About” page – but I believe a blog takes you deeper. An About page is static, while a blog flows with the twists and turns of the business. Blogs are also often written from a more personal point of view than an About page is.

Many businesses find blogging to be a chore, but it is an invaluable tool that helps you market your business, engage your customers and improve your SEO. Following are three of my biggest pieces of advice for making the process a little easier.

3 Tips That Will Take Your Business Blog Writing Routine from Frazzled to Focused

Publish Consistently

Blogging consistently draws more readers and gets your website more attention from search engines. In fact, businesses that blog consistently generate 67 percent more leads than those that don’t.

Beyond the impressive statistics, your business’s website (and therefore your business’s blog) is also often the first impression of you a customer gets.

When I see that a business posts a blog once in a blue moon instead of on a regular schedule, it tells me one key thing: they’re frazzled. The business is too busy to keep to a consistent publishing schedule, and/or they just haven’t made it a priority. This is good news for me as a copywriter, because it’s an area I can help that business with – but it’s not good if I’m a potential customer.

On the other hand, if I see that the business publishes blog posts regularly (whether that’s once a week or once a month), their operation comes across as thoughtful, organized and thorough. And if the blog posts are entertaining, informative or educational, I’ll happily devour a few posts to help aid my decision whether to click “buy” or not.

The best way to ensure that you are publishing consistently is to create an editorial calendar. Not only does this help the blog writing process by doing the planning (like nailing down your topics) in advance, it also helps you to set aside time each week or month to do the work.

When your editorial calendar tells you that you are publishing a blog post about “the top 5 habits of successful salespeople” on Monday, you are more likely to carve out time in your schedule the week prior to get that written and scheduled.

Your editorial calendar doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to work! It should identify the topic, the purpose or angle, the publication date, the author, and (if you are working with a ghostwriter) the writer. I also like to throw links to research material in there, too, and make notes about what I might like to say when I start writing.

Keep a Running List of Potential Topics

For the love of all that’s good, don’t just wing it when it comes to your business blog. Don’t wait for inspiration to strike!

You come across interesting articles, blogs, comments, tweets and opinions every single day. Do you tell yourself “I should write a blog about that. I’m sure I’ll remember it later,” and then have it disappear right out of your brain five minutes later? This is because the human brain has a filter on it.

We are bombarded by so much information every second of every day, our brains can’t process all of it. So our brains filter information. Our brains also dump information out of short-term memory when it is not immediately useful, related to something you are doing in the moment or life-and-death important enough to store in long-term memory.

You simply can’t remember everything. So write it down. Keep that list of topic ideas handy in a notepad or in an app like Evernote.

Now you won’t forget things that you want to include in your business blog and you have lots of fodder for your editorial calendar.

Write to ONE Person

This is where a lot of businesses go wrong. They try to write to their market instead of an individual. This can quickly water down the post and make it less engaging.

Imagine you sell high-end cribs. Baby cribs, not MTV Cribs. Your cribs are made of the highest-quality material, they follow stringent safety standards, and they are so easy to put together you won’t even need any tools. Your market is parents of babies. More specifically, your market is probably mothers of babies.

If you write a blog to mothers, some of your topics might include recommendations on the best baby clothing lines, what the benefit is to nursing over bottle-feeding, how to lose the baby weight, or what the latest product safety recalls are all about.

How do you write to appeal to all the types of mothers out there, though? The single moms, new moms, adoptive moms, low-income moms, high-income moms, moms of twins, hippie moms, tech-loving moms, working moms, stay-at-home moms…

The answer is, you don’t. If you try to appeal to all of those different types of moms in a single blog post, you won’t do a good job of appealing to any of them.

When you started your business, you probably went through the exercise of figuring out your niche market. Go even further and create a “customer avatar.” Essentially this is a made-up person who represents your specific target audience.

Write to that one person and not only will your post be more focused, it will be more relatable too.

If you have been blogging for your business for a while.

This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 3 Tips That Will Take Your Business Blog Writing Routine from Frazzled to Focused