Advice for Setting Up A Business Blog | Mauco Internet Consultants

If you?re not blogging yet, you ought to start right away! Your blog is the cornerstone upon which all your other content is built and promoted. Therefore you need to be actively involved in your company blog and encourage your staff to get actively involved in providing content for your blog.

Your blog is not a one-off quick fix thing that you can get it over and done with. It?s a long term project that once you start you have to stay committed to it. But the time and effort invested in running a business blog always pays off at the end of the day.

Invest sufficient time on developing great content on your blog. Don?t spend the majority of your time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest etc. Though these are great platforms, they are not your platforms. They are platforms run by other businesses. So invest the bulk of your time creating content first and foremost for your blog. Whenever you have great content, publish it on your blog first, then syndicate it to other channels while linking back later. Remarkable content is the foundation of your inbound marketing strategies.

You need to setup your blog on your company domain (e.g. www.companyname.com/blog or blog.companyname.com) and properly integrate it into your company website rather than on a seperate domain or on one of the many free blogging platforms like Blogger, Blogspot.com, WordPress.com, Typepad.com or Bravenet.com (e.g. http://companyblog.typepad.com). A company blog that is setup on your company domain will be benefitial for search engine optimization (seo) and boost your company brand image.

Once you have your blog properly setup on your company domain and website, the next step is to start blogging. Whilst there?s nothing wrong in blogging about your company news, products and services you will be benefit more by changing your focus instead to blogging about timely topics related to your industry so as to identify yourself as an expert and thought leader in your industry. Such blog posts are more likely be shared by your site visitors and this will help your business gain more exposure on the web.

Once you start blogging, you need to develop your own schedule to ensure that you are constantly adding new posts to your blog on a regular and consistent basis. Businesses that blog regularly and consistently generate more traffic to their website via search engines than businesses that don?t. Also regular and consistent blogging will make your website rank higher than your competitors. Encouraging your staff to contribute articles to your blog will ensure that you always have fresh content on your blog to capture the interest of your readers and keep them comming back for more.

Stick to blogging about specific topics that are centered around a particular theme rather than blogging about every little thing that catches your fancy. Publishing off-topic content on your blog will have a negative impact on your blog and drive away potential readers. Sticking to writing on a particular topic or theme will greatly enhance the search engine optmization efforts in the long term. So keep certain keywords in mind (for which you?re looking to rank high in search engines) when you are writing your blog articles.

Variety is the spice of life, so spice up your blog by introducing content variety e.g. video content, podcasts, infographics, guest blogs, curated lists etc.

Encourage your readers to engage with content on your blog through comments and feedback and provide them with the necessary tools/plugins for them to share your content with their community of friends on other different social networking platforms. This will ensure that your content travels far and wide thereby increasing the reach of your content on the web.

Also ensure that you have a good analytics tool integrated into your blog so that you will be able to analyze the traffic that is comming to your blog and know what?s working and what is not. Once you have identified the particular type of topics your audience is interested in and engaging with, then focus on providing more of that type of topic.

Conclusion

Building a successful business blog takes time, effort, and commitment. Don?t give up! If you need help, feel free to drop a comment below or send me a tweet. I would be glad to help.

Thanks for reading. I hope you find this information helpful? If so, please share it with anyone you think will benefit from it.

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photo credit: Kristina B via photopin cc

Source: http://mauconline.net/2012/10/07/advice-for-setting-up-a-business-blog/

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