Blogging is a great way to add a personality to your website and find a voice for your business. It helps to engage and educate your customers and also creates awareness of your business to a wider community, driving new leads to your website. If you’ve already taken the plunge and started a business blog, or even if you’re still considering setting one up, here are 5 tips that will make blogging a whole lot easier.
1.Understand your audience
Do research on who your audience is so that you have a better understanding of what content to write and why. A simple way to do this is by inviting your customers to take a short survey, asking them what their challenges are and what they want to learn. If you have competitors who also have a business blog, check out what they’ve written and whether it’s received good traction. Simply look at which articles have the most social shares or comments so as to identify common interests.
2.Be organized
After you’ve conducted research on your audience and what interests them, start brainstorming content ideas. Create a list, so you can document article ideas as you think of them. You can then draw on these when creating your content plan.
Creating a content plan helps to organize your content and focus your ideas. You could create content specifically on one theme for a certain period of time. Alternatively you could create different pieces of content to address the pain points of your different buyer personas. However you approach your content plan, creating one will make choosing topics easier and will make you more committed to blogging consistently.
3.Enlist help
Blogging does not have to be the sole job of the blog creator. There might be a pool of people that are willing to create content for you. For example, you could enlist the help of other people in your organization. That’s what we did on our blog with this post which one of our engineers wrote. This helps with creating more content and also adds multiple dimensions to your blog.
You can also research what tools will make your life easier. For example, if you know what time of the day is best to promote your content, you can use tools, such as Hootsuite, to schedule Social Media posts, so you don’t have to be on hand at that exact moment to promote your content.
4.Experiment with other content methods
Be creative with the types of content you use. In fact there are loads of other ways to create content that could be as well (or even better) received than written articles, such as video, animations and infographics.
There are many online tools that can help you create good quality videos, for example, we used Camtasia to create this video tutorial that highlights how to use our Custom Panel feature. We’ve also tried animated gifs in a recent blog post. Infographics are another form of content that’s worth investigating, as businesses who market with infographics tend to grow in traffic an average of 12% more.
5.Make it easy to spread the word
Make it easy for your readers to spread the word about the content you’re creating. Once you’ve created an article, make sure you share it across all your social media channels. Additionally, allow people reading your posts to comment or share it to their social networks. You’ll notice on the side of this post a hovering social share toolbar, which allows you to share easily and quickly to your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+ profiles or via Buffer. Making this functionality available will increase content shares.
Finally, if you’re starting a blog or already have one, keep track of your key blog metrics. These will allow you to analyze how effective your blog is, and how much traction your content is getting. Let us know what you are doing to make your business blog successful by commenting below.