How to Blog for your Business

What are the benefits of Blogging?

Blogging can be a fantastic way to engage your customers and prospects and before you know it can become a key part of your marketing strategy.

Blogs can be great for search, writing all this ‘long-form’ content (rather than just 140 characters on Twitter or very sales-focused content for your website) gives you the chance to share your expertise and use lots of keywords as you do so!

Blogging is also great as a way to drive traffic and leads to your website – by warming people up, engaging them on your blog, they are often much more ready to convert to a sale or show genuine interest when they reach your site.

It is also a great place to tie together all the strands of your social strategy, if you are currently operating one, or a nice way to dip your toe in the water if you are not. Ultimately it gives people a chance to see the other side of your business – what the culture is like, who you all are, what you believe passionately about the work you do, what excites you, what your plans and goals for the future are.

But what do I write about?

So, maybe you’re sold on the idea of blogging but when it actually comes to putting pen to paper, you’re not sure exactly where it is you want to begin.

There are lots of approaches and a huge variety in the different types of content that can be combined to make for an interesting blog. For an all-round business blog, you can consider some of the post types below to get you started:

1. Explain something – you are an expert in your field, so start with small things, one topic at a time and clearly explain the process or why this is a good idea. For example, if you run a coffee shop, you might explain how you roast your coffee beans and why you think it is the most delicious way.
2. Use video/screencasts – if you sell products it is particularly useful to demonstrate how easy they are to use or how they really solve a common problem. For example, if you sell printers you can make a short video of you changing the cartridges and re-charging the ink, to show how easy it is with your system.
3. Give an opinion – Tell your customers what you/or the company think about something, for example if you repair mobile phones you can write a whole series of posts on following a recycled/donated mobile and why it is important for the environment for people to do this.
4. Share Testimonials – most company’s collect testimonials, a great way to use them is to collate them and make a blog post out of them. Your approach can be that you are proud of what customers say about you and so you wanted to share it!
5. Talk about your mission – what is the company mission statement? The vision? The reason you are in business? How was the company set up? If you have been established for a long time you can talk about the history, if you are a family business this can be even more interesting.
6. Discuss your charitable connections – perhaps you support a charity financially, or even better, also with your time and your employees’ time. Post photographs of the work you do with the charity, talk about what your next project with them is and why the charity is important to you.
7. Interview someone – many of your customers or employees will be interesting and knowledgeable, maybe opinion leaders or thought leaders. Ask them 5-7 questions and make the interview into a blog post.
8. Ask someone to guest blog – if all else fails, get someone else to write a post! They could be internal (a guest post from one of our mechanics on how to look after your car this winter) or from someone external – maybe you are an events company with a guest post from a journalist attending many events, what are the best bits? What was the favourite event you ever attended?

If you would like any help crafting a blogging strategy or in developing a custom blog, perhaps that fits with the company branding, drop us a line!