It’s day 2 of the #atozchallenge and B is for Blogging!
Here’s 5 Blogging Tips for Effective Business Blogging.
1. Write For Your Audience
It may sound obvious but many of us write for ourselves rather than for our audience. Yes, we are writing to benefit our business in terms of increasing traffic and sales but we must write about content that will interest, entertain and/or inform our audience. We need to fulfil their needs and wants – be it answering a query, showing them the best way to decorate a bedroom, providing a recipe to the best brown bread ever or even making them laugh.
If your business is product-based, it is best to describe and explain the benefits of the products for the customer, rather than describing the features. If I am buying a new vacuum cleaner, I’d like to read a review which shows me how effective the hoover is at suctioning up pet hair or constant crumbs from toddlers rather than telling me the suction power. Many customers prefer to see visual evidence, the numbers don’t mean a lot.
Work out who your target customer is – what age, gender, buying power and spend, location – and what does she’he want to learn from you? How can you benefit them? By visualising your target customer, it will make it much easier to write appropriately for him/her.
2. Share Your Blog Post
The days of clicking ‘publish’ on your business blog and expecting people to find it are gone I’m afraid – due to the levels of competition and also due to the number of people using other platforms to find what they want, you need to share your blog posts across the various platforms such as twitter, facebook, pinterest, google + and LinkedIn (depending on your content and your market).
3. Crowdsource
Crowdsourcing is becoming a very popular method for sourcing content and for drawing crowds of people to your website. I was recently included in a blog post which included 20 other ‘ blogging experts’ on Pinterest, giving a short synopsis on each of us along with a link to each. This would be a good example of a crowdsourced blog whereby readers are finding 21 experts in one fell swoop, each of the 21 are checking out each other and as we are pleased to be included within the post, we are engaging with the author. Can you use crowdsourcing to provide you with more content and/or to build connections?
4. Comment On Other Blogs
Don’t write your blog in a vacuum. Be active on social media and that includes taking the time to leave intelligent and considered comments on other blog posts. By doing so, you will make connections with other bloggers. People buy from people and commenting on other blogs is one way to bring more traffic to your blog and show the personality behind your business.
5. Newsworthy / Topical Content
Can you provide a post with topical or newsworthy content? As I write about social media, there is often new content to be written about as social media updates so often (although I often have work out the changes myself first). For example, there has been much in the Irish media about childhood obesity recently. If you can put your own spin on some of the research and some of the examples provided in the media, it means your content is up-to-date and topical – this topic would suit businesses in nutrition, weight loss, exercise, parenting, medicine, health, and I’m sure there are more.
I hope you can use these 5 blogging tips to bring more traffic to your blog. If you would like to learn more about business blogging, our next online business blogging course starts on 26th May.
