10 Business Blogging Tips to Improve Your Blog Performance
Greetings.
I came across a really useful article in Site Pro News by Matt Jackson giving tips on improving your blog performance. I reprint it here in its entirety – it’s quite lengthly but well worth the read.
10 Business Blogging Tips to Improve Your Blog Performance
By Matt Jackson (c) 2010
Business blogging is a different kettle of fish to blogging for
money and that, in turn, is entirely different to blogging
socially. The type of blog you manage will determine the voice,
design, and style of your blog as well as the efforts you’re
likely to put into promoting it.
A business blog needs to be professional as well as appear it.
Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find
interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog
can keep the line of communication between you and potential
customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich
postings that encourage new traffic and help increase your
client base.
It’s far from an exhaustive list but below are ten tips to
remember when blogging for business:
1 – Set Your Goals Early
In just about every guide you ever read it says “set your
goals”; it might be a cliche but it’s true. With a business blog
your most likely goal is to increase sales but other worthy
goals can include:
o Communicating with your existing or potential clients
o Relaying company news
o Answering queries and questions
o Providing guides for current customers
o Providing a portal to everything useful related to your
industry
The design of your site, type of content to include, whether or
not to include ads, and numerous other decisions will be
governed by the reason that you start blogging. The sooner you
realize what it is that you want to achieve, the sooner you’ll
achieve it.
2 – Use SEO Friendly URLs and SEO Plugins
WordPress is an invaluable SEO tool. It is a dedicated Content
Management System but, more than that, it has a team of
frighteningly dedicated users that create themes, plugins,
widgets, and more and then provide them free of charge to
other users. Among these tools are a great number of SEO related
tools that can be used to determine your meta description and
title tags.
A simple but potentially effective SEO fix is to change the
format of permalinks or URLs so that they dispense with the
default page id to be replaced with an easier to read and
keyword optimized page URL. You can do this through the
Wordpress dashboard.
3 – Consider Your Media Placement
Adding photos and illustrations, logos, videos, and other forms
of media are great for reader engagement, but you should consider
each of your blog assets and place the most valuable and useful
in the most prominent position. The quicker you can grab a
reader’s attention, the more likely you will be to keep it for
longer.
Certain themes allow you to easily embed video and slideshows
into the sidebar of your blog and this can be a very useful tool
to make your pages appear more attractive while relaying
genuinely useful information.
4 – Consider Your Ad Placement
The primary target of a business blog is not usually to make
money directly through the blog itself. Therefore, the placing
of third party ads is not necessarily a good choice. However,
you can add ads for your own company or service as well as
partner websites. You can even add banners to specific
categories, tags, or pages in your blog. Don’t overdo the number
of banner ads and other distracting advertisements though and
try to keep the interface clean and professional.
5 – Offer Your Readers the Chance to Pass You Around
Add me, share this, retweet, and email this functions should be
provided to your users. When you post something useful and one
of your readers shares it, it has the potential to go viral and
create a lot of exposure for your blog and therefore your
website and your business. This works especially well with
highly unique content and can be text, audio, video…
Some themes have these functionalities built into them, but do
ensure that they’re enabled. Alternatively find a sidebar widget
and install this. Many blog readers read a number of blogs
regularly and by enabling them to add you to social bookmarking
and social networking sites you may well develop a long term
relationship with them while also letting them inform others of
what you offer.
6 – Keep Quality Content Coming
Try to set yourself a regular schedule but remember that it can
be broken and it can be added to when necessary. If news breaks,
then post your own commentary on it. If you intersperse product
reviews and articles that relate to your own business then try
to schedule these. Make sure you post regularly, at the very
least once a week, and spend some time getting involved in the
community that builds up around your blog.
7 – Not Every Post Need Be an Advert
As long as you fill your blog with relevant, interesting, and
well written posts then visitors will take the time to look
around, read a few posts, and even click the ads to your own
site in order to see exactly what you have to offer. Not every
single post needs to include multiple links to your website
pages.
You can download plugins that increase the likelihood of users
reading more posts. Some add a list of related posts to the
bottom of each entry while many themes provide the chance to
show “most popular” and “most commented” posts to further direct
the flow of traffic around your blog.
8 – Respond Where Responses are Expected or Deserved
Managing a blog is more than posting a missive of the week’s
news every Friday. No matter how often you post you should spend
some time interacting with the community that develops around
your blog. Answer questions and queries, offer insight, and
provide a response where one is requested.
A business blog should always be professional, which means
keeping posts and messages that are too personal away.
Similarly, spam comments can prove extremely damaging for your
SEO as well as the trust your readers place in your business.
There’s decent spam settings in WordPress and you can further
extend these.
9 – Stuck for Inspiration? Immerse Yourself in Web 2.0
More specifically read forums and blogs, wikis and news sites
related to your own industry. Look for those news stories,
articles, and videos that you like the most and are relevant to
your blog and write about them. Read the comments in your own
blog and look through your analytics to determine the pages that
are most popular with readers.
Look at emerging keywords and news topics and try to act
quickly. Slant the resulting article in favor of your business,
if possible, and then post this to your blog too. There’s plenty
of online portals and sites for news in your industry and you
can use email updates, RSS readers, and browser or home page
plugins to display them regularly and in an orderly and
comprehensible way.
10 – Blogging is Great for Business But Business is Also Great
for Business
Getting stuck into a blog and truly developing your blog
community can be a great way to build traffic to your website
and develop clients for your business. Reading related blogs and
becoming an active member in social networks can help you find
out what your readers want and deliver it frequently.
Blogging and Web 2.0 in general can quickly become addictive. It
should be treated as a tool to assist in managing your online
business, which means that you need to concentrate on the other
aspects of your business. Outsource your blog development and
content creation if necessary and enjoy the results.
================================================================
Using a professional, freelance blog writer helps ensure you
continue to deliver high quality content regularly:
http://www.webwisewords.com/default2.asp?active_page_id=287
WebWiseWords offers a full suite of web content writing services
including blog content writing. http://www.webwisewords.com
================================================================
Copyright � 2010 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
SiteProNews is a registered service mark of Jayde Online, Inc.
Article printed from SiteProNews: http://www.sitepronews.com
Talk soon,
Chineme http://internetmarketingviews.com
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