9 Things You Should Know About Blogging for Business

I’m a big proponent of blogging for business. I urge most of my clients to start a blog as a way of drawing traffic to their site, improving SEO, and setting themselves up as “thought leaders” in their specific area. In fact, a recent study from Hubspot indicates that blogging businesses experience 126% higher lead growth than their non-blogging counterparts.

But before you begin blogging, here are nine things you should consider:

1. Don’t Sell – Your blog should not be about you and your products or services. You are blogging in order to sell…at least not directly. You should be blogging about the things that are of interest to your customers and potential customers. If you are creating good, relevant content, these people will be drawn to your site. Eventually, some of them may become customers. Your blog is merely a touch point to provide information to help people find you. There are plenty of opportunities for selling in other ways. But let your customers find you, and then let them come to you as they inquire about your business.

2. Be Realistic in Your Goals – Start slow with low expectations. Two or three new blog posts a week is a great place to start, perhaps on pre-determined days. It’s all too easy to plan to blog more often, but then realize you don’t have the time, content, or motivation. Better to promise your readers two posts a week, and then give them more, than to promise than five posts a week and only deliver two or three. Blogger burnout is a very real thing.

3. Be Realistic in Your Expectations – Like all other forms of Social Media, blogging is part of building trust and building community, and you shouldn’t expect overnight results. Slow and steady wins the race. Be consistent, and over time you will see results.

4. Give Away Free Information – One of the best ways of building readership, and trust, is by giving away free advice. I talk about this in my previous blog: 5 Ideas for Providing Relevant Content. The idea is to give people the kind of info that you are giving your paying customers. A lot of businesses fear that this will prevent people from paying them for their products or services. On the contrary, while you are giving them useful content, they aren’t getting the personalized, hands-on advice that you give your paying clients. Offering free advice makes your readers that much more likely to pay you for your knowledge and experience.

5. Get Help From Your Partners/Vendors – Just because you commit to blogging doesn’t mean you have to write all of your blogs in-house. Sure, you can always hire someone to write some posts for you, but why not seek out your partner businesses to help you out. If you’re a lawn care specialist, why not get some guest posts written for you from the local greenhouse or outdoor furniture dealer. Think broadly in terms of what your customers want. And even if your partners can’t write a post for you, perhaps they can at least answer some questions so you can write the post in return for giving them credit and a link to their site. This strengthens your relationships with other businesses and further builds community.

6. Seek Out Interesting Content Elsewhere – Not all of your content needs to be original. If you read something online, in a trade-publication, or even in the newspaper, feel free to link to it or include an excerpt, then provide a few sentences of your own take on the item. Just make sure you give full credit to the originator of the content.

7. Use Multimedia – Blogging doesn’t always have to be text. A good video or series of pictures can be just as good as a page full of words. Again, this can be your original content, multimedia content from a partner, or even something you find on the web that you feel will be relevant to your readers.

8. Practice Full Disclosure – Not only is it the law, but it’s smart business practice to give full disclosure in your posts. If you get a free copy of a book to review, make sure you let your readers know that it was a free gift. If you blog about a client, customer, or partner business, let your reader’s know about that relationship. It’s better to be up front about this than to deal with the embarrassment of looking like you were trying to hide something. Your readers will appreciate your honesty.

9. Build Your Blog On Your Site – I’ve seen a few businesses that have used the free Blogger service to create their blog off site. I love Blogger and think it’s great, especially for personal blogs. But if you are trying to draw people to your site, residing at your domain, a Blogger URL won’t be the answer. Talk to whomever built your website to see how you can integrate a blog into your existing site. This is one reason why I usually urge my clients to consider a WordPress site, because these sites are built on a well-constructed, pre-existing blogging platform. My entire site is a WordPress site that cost me very little to build, and even less to maintain.

Any other advice from your experiences with business blogging?

Tagged as: blogging, Marketing, Social Media