Tips For Professional Business Blogging

by | Feb 27, 2014 | Articles, Content Marketing, Interactive Marketing, Public Relations

By Chris Bell | February 27, 2014

Pro Blogging TipsHaving an active blogging platform can distinguish your firm from the pack. Doing so can be especially valuable if:

You are a thought leader in your field, and your opinions matter.  A blog is where you can demonstrate your professional knowledge, share it with colleagues and customers, and contribute to the ongoing professional conversation that surrounds your field.

You want a lift in SEO. A blog can make you and your business instantly findable if it incorporates good SEO practices. This can generate leads immediately and add to revenue.

You need new business opportunities. A blog can generate interest and support the lead generation carried out by your site.

A blog is just one component of your larger digital presence, but it plays a key role as the beating heart of your central hub — your site. From your Blog you can reach out to prospects, engage in PR, and open discussion on issues in your industry. If you can create compelling content, you can start all manner of business conversations that can lead to opportunities.

So, how do I start my own business blog?

  • Buy a domain name. Generally, your domain name should be something that is brief, to the point, and easily memorable. A variation on your firm name is ideal, but not always practical (indeed, Google your own name!)
  • Find a hosting provider. There are tons of affordable, reliable hosting providers out there; popular providers include companies such as GoDaddy and 1 and 1 Internet. GoDaddy’s service provides a virtually one-click WordPress installation feature, which is great if you have an aversion to FTP’ing files.
  • Install blogging software. We recommend  WordPress, because it’s open source, is widely supported by many third parties, and is easy for beginners to use. It’s widely customizable, and you can set up a WordPress blog in a few minutes by using one of the many tutorials found online. WordPress also has a wide variety of pre-made templates (“themes”)  for your blog’s look. You can use one of those themes “out of the box” or modify it if you have the HTML/CSS chops.
  • Set up analytics. This step is often ignored when setting up a blog. Analytics tools are essential for tracking visits and click-throughs to your site, where they came from, and how long they stay on your site. Establish Goals that reflect the goals for your business, be they sales, leads, subscriptions, or other KPI. WordPress has some excellent plug-ins that allow you to easily connect your blog to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Create a content plan. This is the hard part. While we could go exhaustively into what keywords perform better for SEO, and other technical aspects of content marketing, this is your blog. The best thing to do is to find one or two topics a week and write around 500 words on each. It’s smart to create a simple schedule of topics a month in advance, and publish your content to your site once or twice weekly on the same days. This will help you to establish and grow a base of interested readers that will form the base of your blog’s readership. We also recommend getting some form of editorial help, even if it’s just a literate friend who can quickly check for spelling and grammar errors, as well as be a second set of eyes who can review your work before you post it up.
  • Establish performance goals.  What’s your point in doing this anyway? Do you want something as simple as generating a certain number of website visits or going as far as to evaluate performance on individual articles? Your results from Google Analytics and from your social media tools can show you how well you are reaching your audience and how engaged they are.
  • Get onto social media. If you haven’t done so already, establish social media identities on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and LinkedIn. These will be the social channels for distributing your content. We also recommend using Hootsuite to schedule and publish your content simultaneously, and to get a bit.ly account to shorten the URLS that your articles use. This is important because bit.ly can track whoever clicks on your article links, giving you a direct means of tracking article performance.
  • Install sign-up forms. Make sure that you have social buttons and a safe e-mail contact link set up on the blog, easily visible, so that readers can contact you. WordPress has a number of free plug-ins for contact forms that can be programmed to send you e-mails whenever a reader contacts you. You can also integrate directly into CRM systems like Salesforce or ACT, or email platforms like Mailchimp and Constant Contact.  Also, don’t forget your anti-spam plugins.

Decisions, Decisions
Now, with a steady stream of content that is distributed to your followers via social media channels, you have a steady blog running. Below are some issues you should watch out for, as you go about maintaining your professional blog –

To comment or not to comment?  An ever-present worry on blogs is spam. Spammers will use automated tools to place garbage links and keywords onto the comments section of your blog in an attempt to raise their SEO in a Black Hat manner.  WordPress offers a number of moderation options, including fully open comments, moderated comments, or no comments at all. Fully open comments allow anyone to post comments. Moderated comments take time to go through but is the safest protection against spam, as no comment will be published without your permission. Turning off comments makes everything safe and require no time, but one loses the opportunity to turn the comments towards prospecting and to create conversations that are relevant with your readers. Google indexes all text on a site, and relevant commentary counts as relevant content. We recommend using the Google Plus plug in for comments, as it allows granting good comments +1s which get counted and indexed by Google’s algorithm, giving your SEO a double boost.

One step further – Email marketing: Depending on how far you want to go, you can use a free email service such as Mailchimp (free for the first 1,000 contacts) to sign visitors up for an e-mail newsletter that you create. Forms and templates exist that can import signups into your email platforms. This is a tremendous tool for building a loyal audience of subscribers, who then can be sent your high quality content.

We want to hear your questions and experiences concerning business blogging. Contact us if you’d like to chat with our experts.

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