How to blog for business and be successful is a common question faced by businesses all over the world, no matter how small or large. A successful blog for your business can add exceptional value to your business. It can create loyal customers, build trust and attract a large number of potential customers that you would have otherwise not been able to target. The methods discussed in this article show you how to blog for business successfully and maximise its benefits for your business.

Running a successful blog for your business is a great way to improve its online presence.  A blog can improve your search engine ranking and improve your credibility and influence on social media.

Blogging is particularly beneficial for small to medium sized businesses that may not have the high budgets required to promote their products or convey their message to customers using traditional advertising mediums such as print or television.

I am often asked by clients how they can use a blog to grow their business online and be successful at it. I have hence put together a list of 21 tips designed to teach you how to blog for business effectively and achieve desired results. It will help you get started with your business blog.

For easy reading, I have classified the tips into the following three categories:

• Blog Set-up
• Ongoing Maintenance
• Blog Promotion

Blog Set-up:

These tips are related to the set-up and customisation of your blog.

1. Use WordPress

Although there are other blogging platforms our there, you should use WordPress to set up your business blog. WordPress is excellent for SEO and pages tend to rank favourably on search engine results with minimal effort. Most of my WordPress Posts get first page ranking in Google within a couple of hours of publishing with little to no extra effort. Learn more about the 6 benefits of using WordPress.

2. Host Your Own Blog

Although you have the option of using a free hosted service such as wordpress.Com or Blogger.Com, it is important to host your business blog on your existing web hosting provider under your company’s domain name. A blog set-up in a sub-folder of your existing domain name e.g. yourcompany.com/blog will offer maximum SEO benefits. After all SEO is one of the primary objectives blogging for business.

3. Choose Your Niche Carefully

Choosing a micro-niche may be beneficial as it will be easier to establish your blog on the Internet. In any case, your niche should be directly related to your business area. It may be tempting to choose a broader niche to target a wider audience however it will require much more effort and time to drive meaningful results. If your business supplies computer processors, set-up your blog on processors and not computers in general.

4. Choose an Appropriate Theme

Although blogs are largely content driven, you shouldn’t un-estimate the importance of design. There are thousands of sites offering free WordPress themes that you can use for your business’ blog. Paid professional themes are also competitively priced and you can purchase one for a few dollars. Remember to customise your theme whether you use a free or paid theme. Most of the available themes require little to no customisation and offer step by step description should you need to tailor it to meet your needs.

Check out 5 Great Timeless Free WordPress Themes

5. Install the Right Plug-ins

For best results, you will need to download and install few of the available free plugins from wordpress.com. Using the right plugins will enable you achieve more with the same amount of effort. You can install a few plugins like Akismet to prevent comment spam, one of the social plugins to make it easy for readers to share content on social media and a few other plugins to boost reader engagement.

Check Out 5 Free WordPress Plugins to Boost Social Media Engagement

6. Incorporate your Company’s Brand

Your business blog should reflect your company’s brand. Make sure you use your company logo, slogan and include your contact details clearly.  A majority of the visitors are likely to land directly on your Blog post page bypassing your company’s website. The company behind the blog should become clearly evident on your blog as this will allow you to leverage your traffic. On the other hand, you should use take steps to promote your blog on your company’s website. Simply including a menu item to your blog may not be sufficient.

7. Strategic Approach

There are some fundamental differences between how to blog for business or for personal reasons. In running a blog for business, the time and resources utilised need to be justified. You need a strategic approach for a successful business blog in order to meet your objectives.

You need to have focus, define the goals and objectives, have an editorial plan for content, and allocate resources and create a schedule of activities among other planning.

8. Make Effective Use of Call to Action

Blogging for business is result oriented and driving conversions should play an integral part of your strategy. Use appropriate call to action techniques in your design and content to improve conversions. For best results, place them prominently on the site. Some examples of common call to action methods are from call-back request, pre-registration for a product, newsletter registration and RSS feed subscription.

Google Analytics offers an excellent way to track your conversions. You can set up funnels for your Google analytics to do this..

Ongoing Maintenance:

These tips are related to the day to maintenance and running of your blog.

9. Don’t leave it Junior Members

Many businesses make the mistake of leaving their blogging and social presence solely to junior members of the team or outsourcing it. Whilst there is nothing wrong in doing so, it is important to ensure senior members of your team have a direct involvement in the blog. I run a small Web design and Internet Marketing Agency in London and we are a team of seven. However to date I write most of the posts on our blog myself.

10. Involve Other Members of your Team

Blogging is an integral part of a successful internet marketing strategy. You can improve your results by involving other members of your company in either writing posts or sharing its content on social media sites, .

11. Publish Consistently

Once you have published your business blog, you need to make sure it is kept up to date and fresh. Posting daily can allow your to reach your objectives faster however it may not be practical for many businesses. For meaningful results, you should try to post at least once or twice a week. Consistency in publishing is also important. It is better to publish one or two posts every week than not posting for three weeks followed by one week of daily posting.

12. Choose your Topics Carefully

The overall benefit your blogging efforts will bring to your business depends on a number of factors. An important factor is how well your content is received by readers is an important consideration. If your posts go viral, the benefits will increase manifold. Don’t loose focus and make sure all posts are related to your niche. You can tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Google Insight for Search and Google Analytics to help choose new blog post topics.

Read more on 15 Blog Post Topics for Business.

13. Be Professional yet Personal

Keeping a professional tone is more important for business blogs. You can be personal to connect better with your customers but without using casual language if possible and without comprising on your professionalism. Adding a personal touch is important. You don’t want your blog to be an exact reflection of you company’s website where the content is likely to be more impersonal.

As Darren Rowse from ProBlogger points out in hist post on “Tips for Marketing Your Business With Your Blog” that you should use your business blog to give your company a face, voice and personal touch by writing in a more personal voice, using pictures (of the author and other staff members), by showing some of the behind the scenes of your company etc. Be Human!

14. Create Resources to Meet Customer Needs

For best results, offer a mixture of content on your business blog. Find the time to create pillar articles are part of your content mix, in addition to time sensitive news and commentary. Pillar Articles are typically tutorial style articles aimed at teaching your audience something. They are longer than average blog posts, include practical tips or advice and have long term appeal.

Offering resources including How to guides and tutorials will make your blog more valuable and apprealing to readers. Product demos and user-guides on the other hand can help build a community around your products.

15. Pay attention To Your Statistics.

Analyse your website statistics regularly. Google Analytics is great free tool for this. Pay special attention to referring websites, keywords or search queries, popularity of content and bounce rates. All of these statistics provide valuable information for understanding your readers and monitoring the performance of your website.

Use the data to refine your site where necessary and improve your performance. E.g. you can use popular search queries to determine the information customers require the most and use this to select new topics for your blog posts.

Blog Promotion:

The following suggestions are related to methods to promote your blog and leverage your content for maximum benefits. Blog promotion is an in-depth topic so it is not feasible to cover it in detail here. However the main methods are listed below.

16. Utilise Your Existing Customer Base and Network

Many businesses fail to leverage their existing customer base for their blog. Let customers and colleagues know how they can benefit from your blog and invite them to join your blog and social networks. Perhaps you can send an email to your list introducing your blog. You can include a link to your blog on regular communication such as email signatures, letterheads and other materials.

17. Plan and Promote Your Launch

You don’t have to plan an intensive or expensive launch campaign. However you can take advantage of this opportunity to boost your online presence.

You can announce your launch on various social networks such as Twitter, Facebook. You can write a Press Release and publish it on high ranking free news and press release websites. You can create an article about the blog and publish it on leading article directory such as Ezine Articles. You can also publish it on social content sites such as Squidoo and HubPages.  All these methods will boost your profile and generate back-links and free exposure for your blog and business.

18. Syndicate Your RSS Feed

Take steps to syndicate your feed on external sources. You can add it to various RSS feed directories. Many social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn allow to include your blog’s RSS feed. This ensures new content from your blog are automatically displayed on your profile. Twitter does now you to syndicate your feed directly for auto posting content however you can syndicate your feed via a third party services such as Twitterfeed or Huite Suite. This will allow you to post your new posts on your Twitter profile automatically.

19. Social Bookmarking

There are many Social bookmarking sites a business can use to drive traffic such as Digg, Delicious, Stumble Upon, Tumblr are great to attract readers to your blog. They are particularly beneficial for traffic to your blog at the start when you are still building your search engine ranking.

You can use free tools such as Only Wire and Ping.Fm for automating sharing your new blog posts on your social bookmarking and other social profiles. If using this approach, make you combine it with manual postings.

20. Continue to Build and Expand Presence on Social Media

Blogging success and your success of social media are very closely linked. Without effective use of social media, it is next to impossible to run a successful business blog.

21. Leverage traffic between your blog and website

This applies if your website and blog are independent to each other, which is mostly the case. Many users will arrive directly on blogs posts bypassing you company’s homepage and vice versa. You can take steps to integrate or link your site and blog together where feasible to ensure you can leverage traffic from both sources to each other.

There are many simple ways to achieve this. You can list the 10 most recent posts and/of popular posts on the homepage of your company’s website. Similarly, you can include a link to your company’s website in an author box and display it at the bottom of each post on your blog. You can also include a link to your company website’s homepage on your blog navigation. You can also use contextual links to relevant website page in your blog post content where appropriate. You should do this carefully without compromising the readability or usability of content.

Read about the 6 linking habits of successful bloggers.

Summary:

We have discussed 20 tips that teach you how to blog for your business effectively. There are additional steps you can take to improve your business blog and promote it on the Internet. Please leave a comment if you would like to suggest additional ways on how to blog for your business successfully. Blogging for business is a powerful tool to establish a loyal customer base and grow your business online.

The author K.Singh is a London based Internet Consultant with over 10 years of experience working with established multi national businesses as well as SME’s.  He is currently the Director of  Web Design & Internet Marketing Company in London.