Blogging top tips for your successful business blog
Find out the special elements of a blog
Shout about you and your business
Let your customers know how wonderful your business is. The more information you can provide your customers, the more likely they are to buy from you!
Spread your expertise
Give your customers lots of top tips relative to your business, such as maintenance or other helpful advice. Although it may not seem much to you, it will create a good impression to others.
It’s so much quicker!
As soon as you publish your post, it has the potential of being seen virtually instantaneously on the web (especially through RSS). Spiders visit blogs far more frequently than websites, so you can get higher on the search engines much sooner.
Link back to your website
Do this regularly within each blog post, specifically within the relevant content. Make each link contextual: use the relevant words in the phrase as the link, not ‘click here’ which is worthless.
Check out this post: Keywords should entertain blog readers as well as search engine spiders
Create more links to your website
Set these up on the side bar of your blog, or when you comment on other people’s blog posts. The more links back to your website the better, and this encourages both visitors and internet spider activity.
You don’t need a webmaster
The beauty of blogs is that they are totally self-editable. The system is designed to be user-friendly, and once you’re up and running very simple to keep updated.
Encourage feedback
Ask for comments from your readers. These are not only good for you, but good for the responders as well. The more interaction, the more links, all perfect for increasing your exposure on-line.
Check out this post: To comment or not to comment, it’s all about interaction
Customise your blog
Choose from a number of free templates, which can easily be adapted to reflect your corporate image. Use the visual e-courses from Make a Blog! where you can pick and choose which elements you want to include to enhance your blog.
Anybody can blog
You can give permission to any number of contributors to help you write for your blog. As blogs benefit from frequent posting, this will be good for your readers too, who are more likely to return for more.
Perfect for publicity
Tell your increasing audience about your new products or projects, and crow about any achievements or positive news you may have.
Short and sweet
Don’t make your posts too long, otherwise they become articles. Blogs benefit from frequent posting, so brevity with suitable links to resources elsewhere will be appreciated by busy blog readers.
Pay attention to your headlines
Not only are they used within the permalink of each post, they also benefit from being packed full of keywords and should be designed to attract your readers to encourage them to read more.
Use keywords to feed the spiders
It’s important to create relevant tags at the end of each post, and be aware of using keywords in the content to maximise SEO. Spiders are more likely to look at the beginning, middle and end of posts, so that’s where your keywords should be concentrated.
Check out this post: Forget your blog, forget your readers, forget SEO
Relevant to business
Always make sure your posts are relevant and worth reading. Remember your blog can explain more about your business than on your website, so don’t exasperate it by posting up useless stuff.
Power of the picture
Post up lots of pictures to compliment your content and provide extra interest for your readers.
Check out this post: How aware are you of the power of the picture?
Feed to practically anywhere
By creating a RSS feed you can automate a link of each new post to appear elsewhere, such as social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Even your newsletter provider can automatically send out your blog posts to your database, and RSS also allows regular readers to follow you through Google.
Check out this post: RSS simply explained
Email your new posts
Get your readers to sign up for email notification every time you publish a new post. It will enable them to keep in the loop before anyone else.
Create a simple membership site
The beauty of a blog is that your can easily set up password protected pages or posts, so that only invited readers can enter or read them.
Check out this post: How many ways can you use your blog?
