Blogging on your business website is an incredibly powerful marketing, sales and customer relations tool. Your website stays fresh, attracting new customers and affiliate opportunities and improving your rank on search engines.
If you're not blogging, then you're missing out.
Set a Content Strategy
Especially for business blogging, setting a content strategy is crucial. You'll avoid looking scatterbrained by posting random, irrelevant content.
Laying out the topics of blog posts ahead of time will keep you and your bloggers on track as well as providing some stability to your readers. Further, setting up what types of posts to add is almost as important as the topics.
Try to include a variety of subjects and types like:
- Company press releases
- Press conference videos
- Video advertisements
- Staff news
- Product information and updates
- New customers/affiliate relationships • Industry news
- How-to's
- Webinars/tutorials on subjects relevant to your readership
Include Keywords and Phrases
Keywords help new readers find you through search engines and help you organize your blog topics.
But, there's a tendency in the SEO world to overuse keywords and phrases. People think that the more keywords there are in, say, a blog post, it'll improve their website's rank.
First, it's an extremely annoying practice. Your readers will see right through your tactics and realize that you're not there to provide valuable information but to have Google like them a little more.
Second, "keyword stuffing" actually hurts a page more than it helps. Search engines have gotten wise on the practice and punish those people by booting their rank all the way down to the bottom.
The bottom line is that keywords and phrases are necessary for blogging, but don't go crazy. For every 100 words or so, stick in a keyword.
Invite Guest Bloggers
Guest bloggers are a great trick to lure in more readers. It'll immediately increase the prestige of your blog, especially if the guest blogger is a known quantity.
As a result, your readers will take you more seriously. With guest bloggers, always include a bio, credentials and contact information, including their personal blog and social media sites.
Try inviting your CEO, product developers, customers (for reviews) and industry experts.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of business blogging best practices later this week.
