We all know the benefits of publishing business blog content on our corporate websites. Compared to websites which don’t have a blog, corporate websites that have well-maintained, regularly updated blogs generate up 130% more sales inquiries in the long run! How can you improve your business blog’s content?
However, with so much competition online, it can be a tough fight to grab top search engine rankings or thousands of engaged fans on Facebook. The key (which you will hear many content marketing gurus repeatedly shout) is to create high-quality business blog content.
But what is quality content?
For a business blog, content that is able to increase social engagement, improve brand awareness and generate revenue in the long term can be safely called great business blog content. It is content that leverages digital marketing channels to attracts visitors and leads to your business.
Fortunately, there are plenty of ethical and highly effective ways in which you can improve the overall quality of your business blog content. Following these techniques can help you develop a powerful marketing medium which is off the beaten track and, ultimately, improves your company’s branding and bottom line.
Corporate blogging covers a variety of niches since different companies deal in different products and services. Therefore, it is important to note that the methods mentioned below may not work effectively for all business blogs. Remember to adapt and utilize techniques to suit your specific case.
12 Evergreen Tips to Improve Your Business Blog Content
This list has been divided into three aspects of a business blogging – content, design and promotion. Ideally, this is the flow in which you should plan your blog content strategy. First, create the content and ensure all design best practices are in place. Once you’ve done that, follow it up with plenty of blog promotion to get the right audience.
Content Creation Tips
1. Define your Audience
The first thing that you need to do is to identify your target audience. A number of corporate blogs suffer from what I call “blind-blogging” which basically means blogging without any specific reader in mind. Developing customer personas and creating content for your ideal customers will help your blog in the long run. In addition to this, the job of creating content for a specific type of customer becomes more fun so chances of you consistently producing content and implementing other strategies to improve the blog will increase.
Creating content for a specific audience in mind an easier and better way to ensure that you’re reaching the right customers and getting results. Marketing to everyone only ensures that you market it to no one!
2. Create new content regularly
Update your blog regularly with new content to keep people interested. No matter how popular your company’s services may be, if the content on the blog is not refreshed at regular intervals, it will be hard to pin down a dedicated audience for the page. Some business blogs struggle to create original content. The trick then is to keep up with the latest trends in your industry, see what others are talking about and post about the latest topics as soon as possible.
Create newsworthy content which people want to learn more about will contribute towards increasing reader interaction. Sometimes, you don’t have to be different than the competition, you just have to be slightly better. Another beautiful tactic is to curate new content. Collecting and sharing roundups such as “top 10 articles to read in May” or “100 great resources to [insert activity here]” etc. are great methods for building traffic generating resources.
If you’re struggling to create blog posts, perhaps this list of 100 practical blog post ideas will help you start producing some awesome content.
3. Diversity your business blog content
Great content is the foundation of effective content marketing so whatever you create for your business blog needs to be fresh, relevant, unique and informative. Create case studies, client stories, educational information for vendors, new product updates, host contests, create helpful buying guides – there’s a lot of content that can be created to help market your brand effectively.
Baba Ramdev has leveraged content marketing effectively to aggressively expand his Yoga and Ayurvedic products company, Patanjali Ayurved. Here is a great infographic which can act as a guide to diversifying your business blog content and attract readers from a variety of sources and with a diverse set of interests.
4. Compelling headlines
Most content marketers miss this, or are too lazy to spend time on this, but writing powerful headlines for each piece of content is a great way to attract readers and visitors. It can dramatically lift the overall impact of your business blog.
Just try this experiment:
- Try changing headlines/titles for some your older blog posts and share them on your twitter/facebook profile.
- Measure the impact they have as compared to the last time you shared that post.
- Now, change the headline again after reading a few helpful headline writing guides here, here and here.
- Share again on a social media channel with your new powerful headline and measure the results.
- Invariably, you will notice the traffic increase.
So why does this work? The headline is the first sentence that people will read before they look inside a blog post. If the headline fails to grab their attention, people won’t read more, no matter how well-written or interesting the content. Plus, writing great headlines will get you more traffic and shares from social media channels.
5. Learn and execute basic SEO
SEO friendly blog posts and other content help the blog rank high on search results which can get you insane amounts of traffic, day after day. SEO or search engine optimization doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money! Many businesses complain about SEO companies charging an arm for getting their businesses on the front page of Google but if you can learn and execute basic SEO tricks to your blog posts, it can have a powerful effect indeed!
Before you start blogging for business, perform keyword research using Google Keyword Planner tool to identify high traffic keywords. Write and optimize content for your blog based on those relevant keywords. Use Meta tags which gel with the keywords you have identified. Also, your content should be compelling enough for your target audience to spread the information you’ve posted.
A great tactic to discover keywords is to analyze the performance of competitors and see which keywords they are targeting. This will definitely keep your corporate blog ahead of the pack. In addition, ensure that all your posts are properly formatted. Use H1, H2, H3 headings depending on the importance of different parts of the content. Not only will this improve search rankings, but also help increase your page’s readability. If you have higher content marketing budgets, take help from a graphic designer to take your blog content’s design to a whole new level. I especially like how Coschedule designs each of its blog posts.
6. Create interactive content
Content needn’t always be a lot of text. In fact, many of my digital marketing students struggle to write quality stuff. How do you create quality content then? Try using illustrations, photos, video and other graphical elements. Not only will they make your business blog content more interesting, interactive content such as these will also boost engagement and sales.
Video is perhaps the most powerful of all content forms from an SEO and quality metric but it can also be expensive to execute. This video can range from your corporate films to generic, educational content on YouTube. Information consumed through an audio-visual medium has longer staying power and leaves a lasting impact on readers. If you don’t have huge budgets to create video content, you can also use tools such as Powtoon to create cheap, effective animated videos.
Content design tips
7. Blog design best practices
The design of your blog will play a big role in how well users interact with your content. This often creates a lasting impact in . Design your blog in such a way that it is colorful, quick loading and SEO friendly. Enable subscription options, including RSS Feeds, to help interested visitors track your latest posts.
Harness the power of social media by adding social sharing buttons to your blog. SumoMe is a great plugin to do this quickly. Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. can help drive quick traffic to your blog.
Lastly, create an email subscription form on your blog so that readers can subscribe to your email list and automatically receive new blog posts in the future. In fact, publishing an email newsletter is a great way to engage with regular readers and sell products, promote exclusive offers and take valuable feedback. Make sure that the newsletter contains up-to-date information about your firm. Also, share exclusive content for your newsletter subscribers to make them feel valued.
8. Optimize for Mobile
According to a media report by Gartner, mobile web traffic grew by almost 70% in 2015! The world is becoming increasingly mobile and your corporate blog should reflect that. Make sure that your blog has a mobile responsive and can be easily accessed across a range of mobile devices. If basic controls like pinch and zoom don’t work, your visitors may lose interest. Indiamart, a popular Indian B2B portal still suffers from this. While they offer unique templates to their clients, all their mobile websites have the same boring template!
Promoting your business blog content
9. Online Forums and Communities
To make your blog more visible, it is important to increase your overall online exposure. Participating in relevant online forums and communities is a great way to do this. Find out where your target audience is active and start participating in discussions. If you don’t have a time, hire a college student or freelancer to do this for – it is one of the most effective tactics to build authority in your niche.
In addition to this, forums also help in discovering topics which are currently relevant in your space so you can create the right content for your business blog. Quora and Triberr are two great places to start, but you can also search for “category + forum” in Google to discover some more hangouts. For instance, if you run a dental practice, then try searching for “health + forum” or “dentist + forum“. In addition to this, you can also use content aggregator and social bookmarking sites such as Reddit or Digg to promote your blog posts. Make sure that the content you post is in a relevant thread and is useful for the members of the community. Of course, as with all other things in life, excess is harmful so don’t post too many links since other users on these sites will then ignore your content.
10. Build relationships with other bloggers
Blogging is a lot like real life. To get ahead, you need to build powerful networks of friends and allies you can rely on to help you spread your message. To build this network, you can email other bloggers with an introduction to your blog, invite them to submit posts, or ask them for guest posting opportunities. Who doesn’t like a free guest post after all?
Another beautiful tactic to increase your interactions with other bloggers is to comment on their blogs on posts which are related to your own topics. Leaving links on popular business blogs in the comment form will generate valuable backlinks. However, do ensure that you comment adds value to the discussion in some form. Don’t make the mistake of posting a spammy comment, the ones which are commonly found below Youtube videos!
11. Guest posts
No matter how good your content is, if it doesn’t attract any readers, then its going to stay ineffective. One of the most evergreen ways to improve your business blog content and traffic is to regularly post content on other, more established blogs. Leveraging the power of guest blogging, you can effectively create a name for your blog in the blogosphere.If you’ve managed to build relationships with other business blogs, then you’ll have an easier time doing guest posts. When you post on other blogs and link back to yours, it will increase the traffic and interaction on your own blog.
This is the same tactic which new music groups use when they perform “opening acts” for more popular artists. Apart from posting on other blogs, you can also invite respected people (known as influencers) in your field to post their opinions on your company blog. This way, they are likely to share that post with their online audiences, bring back more traffic to your blog. To gain maximum mileage out of a guest posting opportunity, ensure that your articles contain relevant keywords and link to articles on your blog. Guest posting is a powerful technique when blogging for business and leads to quality backlinks.
12. Other reader engagement tactics
Apart from posting regular business blog content, leveraging reader engagement tactics such as contests, giveaways, and online surveys on your blog can be especially powerful in bringing a certain diversity in the content and boosting engagement metrics. These are quite easy to run but only do so when you have a sizeable traffic on a daily basis. You wouldn’t want to do a contest or survey with hardly any participation!
Online surveys on your blog will help you the opinion of your readers. Consequently, this will help you understand where and how you need to make improvements. Make sure that the surveys you keep are not long and tedious. Visitors are more likely to fill a survey they can complete in a minute or two. Using tools such as Typeform and SurveyMonkey or Google Forms are great ways to run surveys effectively. To ensure maximum participation, you can tie up your survey with an additional offer such as a freebie or a discount code.
Conclusion
Unlike traditional marketing, perhaps one of the biggest benefits of digital content marketing is the longetivity of content. Great content might come at a significant cost initially but if you consider the fact that whatever you create today will continue driving traffic, visitors and leads for years to come, the cost eventually keeps coming down.
In addition to this, the overall content marketing cost comes down with each new piece of content because that helps drive visitors to other blog posts as well. Hence, any investment in your business blog content is a very safe and smart investment indeed.
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading and if you liked this post, please share it with your friends. Also, if I have missed out any tactic to improve business blog content, please do share in the comments below.
Wow, thanks so much for mentioning CoSchedule! Especially glad to see you enjoy the graphics!
You’re welcome 🙂