Blogging for Small Business: How To Improve Your Blog Experience

You’ve heard all the buzz and now you feel pressured to do it. Blogging. According to HubSpot, B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads per month than those who don’t and B2B companies that blog get 67% more. The numbers seem to speak from themselves. Maintaining and promoting an active blog is a smart business move.

But what is a blog? By definition, it’s a personal website or web page to record opinions, links to other sites, etc. on a regular basis. Think of it as a diary or journal, a place to post your thoughts and insights. For businesses, a blog is a way to humanize itself. Taking selling of the table, blogs give businesses a chance to show off just how much it knows, thereby earning the respect and trust of readers.

When done right, blogs can help drive high-quality traffic to your website and generate more leads for your business.

So the question really isn’t whether or not you need a blog, it’s what content goes on it once you have it. That’s the tricky part.  And there’s no easy answer or magic formula that’ll get you discovered overnight…although that does happen occasionally.

Here are three insights that may help you navigate your business blogging experience…

1. Identify Your Audience. Before you can write content that makes sense for your readers, you have to first figure out who your readers are. Who are you writing for and what are they expecting to learn from you by being on your blog? Keep that in front of you every time you write and stay on message.

2. Solve a problem.  Now that you know who you’re writing for, identify what business challenges they have and provide solutions. The key here is to give them just enough information to show them that you know you’re stuff, but stopping shy of giving them so much that they don’t need to call you to fix it. If crafted correctly, you can unearth a need for your reader that they didn’t even know they had, while providing an educational balm at the same time.

3. Promote it. No matter how good your blog is, if your ideal reader doesn’t know it’s out there, your content won’t reach them to help them solve their problems. Optimize your blog posts. Include compelling headlines, eye-catching images, share buttons, and relevant keywords to help with search.  Share links to your posts across your social platforms and through email campaigns.  Get the word out.

It’s fair to say the business blogging should be an essential piece of your online marketing efforts. Agreed? It will take work to get started and even more work to maintain it.  And just like everything else, you’ll need to measure it for effectiveness and make changes when things aren’t working. But, if you can stick with it, work to improve or bring people in to help you, you’ll find that taking the time to give out a little free advice will pay off big for your business in the future.