Blogging as an activity has graduated from being just a way of sharing your personal thoughts, opinions, stories and ideas with people in the online world, to something that even businesses are using to connect on a one-on-one level with their audience. From something that was very ‘personal’ and ‘private’, blogging has become a very public activity.
But, here’s the thing; the advantage of business blogging is just that. Businesses can use the ‘personal’ nature of blogging to tremendous benefit. Their blogging identity allows them to create a separate and a more humane identity for their business, which is radically different compared to their more impersonal and profit driven entity that their business otherwise is.
Business bloggers have a tough job on their hands to get their blog posts absolutely right, so that the business blog becomes a sure fire hit, and it achieves all that it is supposed to achieve.
Let’s take a look at 5 things that business bloggers get right, something that you should too, if you want to ensure success for your business blogging activity.
Research
Who is my audience? Who is going to read my blog? What do my readers like reading? What are their interests, preferences and needs? How do I pick a topic that will provide a solution for their needs? Successful business bloggers ask these questions and then some more.
The key to successful blogging is research, which essentially means understanding your purpose, target audience, their needs, and then finding subjects that will address those needs. Blogging, especially business blogging is all about identifying a particular problem that the target audience is facing, and then solving the problem through a well written blog post.
For e.g., if you are a company offering web design services, you must identify the kind of problems that your target audience might be facing and try to solve this problem for them.
One common problem or let’s say need for your audience, is how do they know a particular a particular company is all that it claims to be.
Well a topic herein could be “How do you check the credibility and reputation of a web design firm”?
That’s definitely something that your audience will look up. But, you can’t just get a topic idea out of thin air. You need to research to get the right topic, and conduct more research to write relevant content.
Successful bloggers are all research specialists. They take time out to do their homework, and only then get started on writing a blog post.
Content
How you approach a blog post in terms of your content is also important. Apart from the grammar, sentence construction, spelling, and structure that you must get right, there are other aspects also that you mustn’t get wrong.
One such aspect is talking directly to the reader. Yes, make the content less formal and get a bit of interaction going between you and the reader. It’s quite obviously going to be you talking to your audience, but there should be space created for banter. Talk to them as you will to your friend. This will help you engage with them at a personal level. That is an absolute must, if you want your blog to be a success.
Well written content in blogging parlance, is not just about making zero writing errors, its all about getting your readers interested in what you are writing about.
Credibility
Are you focusing on facts or fluff? This is the key here. Readers want information that is useful and not something that is imaginative. They need to be able to make use of it to solve their problem. They are not coming to a business blog just because you have written something that helps them pass their time.
This is the reason why an effective business blogger is very careful about what he/she blogs about. For them, their credibility is important, they are out to build a reputation for themselves, and by association their business as well. For this reason, they only write about things that they have knowledge of and wherein in the content is full of facts, and pertinent information.
They check and cross check for errors, which ensures that they are able to offer only the right kind of information. This improves their authority in their domain, and their audience trusts them to offer only helpful information. This improves readership and leads to blogging success.
Regularity
“I am bored today, wont post a blog”, “ I don’t know what to write on today, so I will let it be”, “ I just don’t feel like it today”; you wont find these reasons coming from the mouth of serious business bloggers.
They realize the importance of making regular posts, because they owe this to their audience. A blog only becomes popular, if a blogger keeps making posts at regular intervals. This gets the audiences to the blog, and they keep checking up on the blog regularly.
If the audience senses irregularity, they stop coming to the blog. This, as can be imagined, is not something anybody wants.
Promotion
Don’t miss out on promoting your blog. Yes, that’s an important part of its success as well. Your blog is like your product, and if you don’t market that, how will anybody know, it’s out there. So, this is also something that every business blogger worth his salt does.
Promote your blog through link building (if you seriously want to make use of SEO), or create a Facebook and/or Twitter page for it, and start building followers for it; start doing anything and everything to market your blog. Otherwise, it will fail. Pure and Simple!
End Words
If you want to start a business blog, these are five mainstays of business blogging that you will need to perfect over time. It’s not something that is easy, and you will only get the hang of it after you put in some effort into the proceedings. All you need to do is stay there, and keep working at it.
February 10, 2014
