Starting a blog can be exciting and exhilarating, but let’s be honest here, the early stages of a blog can be hard. You’re often writing for tiny audience consisting of your mum, your cat and your best friend.
But it doesn't have to be that way - hang in there - it gets better! Keep writing. Just put your head down and WRITE. Consistently. Just do it. The more you continue to provide good content, the faster your blog will gain traction.
To give your blog the best chance for success, follow these 7 tips to business blogging success.
1. Know Your Audience
Really get clear on who your audience is for your business blog. Is it mums? Is it young people who like to garden? Entrepreneurs with car-based businesses? Women looking for fashion advice? The better you know the interests and behaviour of your audience, the better you’ll be able to write content that attracts their attention.
2. Niche
Finding a niche will help you with #1. If you’re writing for everyone, it’s going to be hard to
A) Focus and
B) Develop a good relationship with your readers.
Tightening your niche will also help you gain targeted traffic and position yourself as an expert in your field.
3. Be Consistent
Throwing up a blog post here and there with weeks in between will not help bring traffic to your blog very quickly, if at all. If you don't show up on your business blog, how can you expect your potential leads and customers to find you? Also, if you don't show up on a regular basis on your own website, how often do you show up for your customers? It might be all the time, but inconsistency in one area of your business impacts all the other areas.
You don’t have to blog every day (but you can, there's no law against it), but you do need to be consistent. 2 to 3 times a week is an achievable goal. Creating an editorial calendar is a valuable way to be strategic and plan your post topics ahead of time. WordPress has an excellent plugin in for this called, you guessed it, “Editorial Calendar”!
4. Be Personable
People relate to people. The more you can weave in your own personal stories or experiences into your blog posts, the more your readers will connect with you. It’s helpful to use “you” in your posts so your readers feel like you’re talking directly to them. Remember, be real! Even if you are B2B, you are still talking to human beings.
I've lost count of the number of people who refuse to infuse their personality in their blog because they're "B2B". It's almost as if they think that bland and generic is memorable...
Content Connection - Express yourself!
If you're worried about how to express yourself in your content, then you'll love how this quick course will help you discover your brand voice!
5. Be Passionate
It’s going to be very hard to write blog posts consistently if you don’t like the subject you’re writing about. Trust me, I know. I struggled writing about the transport business we had because it wasn't what I did. But, I did find things in the business to care about and share that aspect in our content. Be sure and chose a niche and/or an angle of your topic that you enjoy and writing about it inspires you as much as it will inspire your readers.
6. Check Out the Competition
Find blogs that talk about a similar topic and see which of their post topics are popular. You can do this by seeing the number of comments that are left and by how many times the article has been tweeted (often you can see this with a social icon next to the blog post). This will tell you which topics are hot and which ones you should also be writing about - without copying of course! Copying will leave you feeling like you don't deserve your business blogging success, and no one likes a copy-cat.
7. Get Involved in the Blogging community
To get more traffic to your blog, you need to leave your blog. Leave comments on similar blogs, not spammy or salesy comments, but ones that add to the conversation. Use Facebook and Pinterest to get to know other bloggers in your niche. Get out there and get involved! It’s not enough just to blog about your business anymore you have to actively network and get to know other bloggers too!
So there we have it! 7 tips for a successful business blog.
If you find you're needing a little extra help with your business blogging why not join the Business Blogging challenge?
