Blogging for Business : The Basics

Business blogs can be a key addition to your digital marketing strategy. By helping to personalise your business and build trust your blog can easily serve as a powerful online marketing tool.

Establishing a blog for your business is a great way to extend your online reach, enhance your businesses reputation and ultimately add value to your customers experience.

Key benefits of business blogging
Differentiation. Use your blog as a differentiation tool to set your business apart from your competitors and keep it at the forefront of your customers minds, always.

Become the expert. Blogs can be used to show off your industry expertise and establish your business as the leaders in your field.

Grow your online network. By engaging readers with impressive content you will encourage readers to subscribe and join your ever growing list of online contacts.

Lead generation. Readers are likely to link to posts and encourage others to join in.

Boosting brand awareness. Your blog acts as a representation of your brand and can communicate exactly what it stands for.

10thStep’s Top Tips for business blogging
Essentially anyone can blog but in order to maintain a successful business blog there are some key things you can do to deliver maximum return on engagement.

1) Brand your blog. Customise your blog so that it correctly represents your branding and differentiates you from the competition.

2) Identify your audience. Consider exactly who will be reading your articles and tailor them to match their interests. Generally it will be your customers, suppliers, members of your industry and potential customers.

3) Stay committed. Many businesses start blogging then quickly lose focus. By simply adding ‘blogging’ to your weekly ‘must do’ list you can easily stay on top of your readers demands.

4) Forget your sales spiel. Blogs are all about content. Top notch content that goes beyond your customers expectations and isn’t just a regurgitation of your sales pitch with a few pictures. Write about interesting topics that surround your business and provide added value for your customers. For example, if you are a local restaurant you may blog about sourcing fresh local ingredients, recipes to try at home or top things to do in the surrounding area.

5) Shout loud and proud. Once you have established your blog tell everyone so that they can tell everyone too! Without publicising your blog you can’t expect to have an overnight community of followers.

6) Be search engine friendly. Blogs are a great way of keeping your company services or products fresh in search engine rankings. Without being too obvious try to make use of a few key words that can help you rank more positively on the search engines.

At 10thStep we’re blogging experts. Chat to us today about how you can build an engaging business blog.