Top 5 tips for business blogging.
You’ve got blogs to write and (more importantly) a business to run. So let’s get started:
Make sure your blog is visible.
This may seem obvious, but it’s amazing how often I struggle to find a blog on a business website. Put a link to it in the main menu and then a scattering of internal buttons with links across to it on other pages. Google loves a good internal link and so do I.
2. Keywords. Use them, but use them wisely.
Gone are the days when it was acceptable just to fill a post with keywords and copy and paste it onto a hidden page in your site once a week. Sorry. Google will now punish you in the listings for this sort of thing. The key here is to use some free software (I like Keywords Everywhere over on Chrome) to discover your top ranking search terms and then use them sensibly in posts which are readable and relevant.
If you’re struggling to come up with post titles then let me offer another tip – make your post title a FAQ that you hear a lot from your customers and then answer it in full. It might be about pricing, your services, what makes your product the best… you get the picture.
3. Re-use your content as much as possible.
Recycling isn’t just good in the real world, but it’s a great habit in your digital landscape too. If you’ve bothered to create a great blog post, with loads of lovely keywords, then you owe it to yourself to get as much mileage as possible out of it. You DEFINITELY need to post it on your Google My Business page (Google rewards people who use all of it’s tools and services). But could you also post it on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest? Or what about sending it out to everyone on your email marketing list as a little nudge to pay you a visit again?
4. Create ‘evergreen’ content.
So-called ‘evergreen’ content is simply blog posts that remain relevant for a long time. So they’re not seasonal or relating to a specific one-time event or product that is no longer available. This is actually easier said than done for a lot of businesses (mine included). Making sure that your content is up-to-date and relevant is really important to your customers – as it makes your business feel up-to-date and relevant. But it also allows you to get more of that lovely mileage out of your posts. If you have an evergreen post that you can stick on Pinterest and forget about, you will find that it will continue to quietly serve you for as long as you leave it out there.
5. Timing.
Timing is really important in the blogging universe. But it’s also pretty straight forward and easy to manage. Google doesn’t scan your website everyday, but when the bot does turn up, it’s really important that it finds new content to scan, so that it can keep your website at the top of it’s list of places that must be active and relevant for it’s beloved users. If you dump 30k words on your website one (extremely productive) Sunday afternoon then that will be great for the next time the bot shows up. But if you then ignore it for 6 months then all that hard work is basically undone. So, when you sit down to do your blog posts make use of the scheduling capacity in WordPress or use an external service like Asana, Tailwind or Meet Edgar (there are loads out there depending on your needs and budget) and have them drip feed the content into your site at regular intervals.
Looking for more support with writing your business blog? Check out this blog post or get in touch to discuss how could work together to boost your business blog productivity.