A business blog is a fantastic marketing tool that helps you highlight products and services, and speak to customers directly. You can customise your message, develop a brand voice, and differentiate yourself from competitors, all by blogging for business.

Here you’ll find out all you need to know about business blogging, including:

• How it can benefit your business
• How to develop your own business blog
• What to consider when you start blogging for business

What is a business blog?

A business blog consists of individual web pages that discuss topics related to the business or industry concerned. These pages are grouped together, typically under a ‘Blog’ heading, forming a coherent structure that’s easy for readers and search engines to navigate.

If you haven’t yet started blogging for your business you’re missing out on a huge marketing opportunity – one that your rivals may already be using. It’s a great way to connect with existing customers and attract new ones, and it’s never too late to start.

In fact, starting a business blog brings numerous benefits but you have to be organised and consistent in your approach to creating content – in particular, in making sure the content is relevant.

So why is blogging so important for your business?

Why create a blog for your business?

• Developing a business blog transforms your website into a high value marketing asset that helps you rise up the search engine rankings
• Each blog post is a separate page that can be indexed by Google and other search engines so your exposure grows along with your blog
• The sheer number of people using search engines to find information on products and services before they buy means there’s an accessible audience
• Creating a business blog with a clear focus and strategy helps you get ahead of your competitors and retain customers
• You attract visitors to your site, keep them there with engaging and informative content, and build trust over time
• A business blog is central to your content marketing efforts, and benefits your business by becoming a rich source of information that drives sales

Developing a blog promotion strategy is key to the process, however – sharing your content on social media and collaborating with other blog owners is just part of the process that brings amazing results when done right.

Benefits of blogging for business owners

Drive traffic to your website

Regular blog posting drives traffic to your website and increases the potential for leads and sales. You generate inbound links, and by re-purposing your blog posts you can extend your reach across different platforms – publishing an e-book for example, or starting a regular podcast that attracts a different demographic.

So what do you need to consider?

• The content should be optimised for the search engines
• It should ‘speak’ to your audience
• It needs to be varied and engaging whilst addressing their specific issues or problems

Build trust and rapport by business blogging

When you operate purely online, trust is a vital issue. By demonstrating your knowledge of the industry and providing relevant and helpful information on your business blog rather than using it to sell, you enjoy one of the biggest benefits of business blogging – gaining the trust of readers and building rapport.

Generate and convert leads

Blogging is a ‘slow burn’ of lead generation using high quality content, and gentle conversion over time. You can build an email list of blog subscribers, and eventually market your products and services to a collective of known supporters.

There are three main stages in the conversion process:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

Blogging is a key element in all three stages – regular posting on your blog:

• Brings awareness to your products or services
• Provides the information needed at the consideration stage
• Gently guides visitors towards a purchase decision

Build brand awareness by blogging for your business

Posting high quality content on your business blog, sharing it on social media, and regularly responding to comments, helps you develop and maintain brand awareness. In turn, the strong brand identity creates a buzz around your business and allows you to establish a loyal following for the long-term.

Become a thought leader

Although becoming a thought leader isn’t a fast process, blogging is a fundamental element as with so much similar content on the internet, people are actively looking for fresh perspectives and expertise to draw on.

You’ll need to regularly read other blogs and news to stay up-to-date on current industry issues, but creating compelling content is a great way to establish your position as a thought leader and differentiate yourself from competitors.

Create value by business blogging

You create value for your readers when you provide solutions to their problems via your blog, and one way to do this is by answering customers’ frequently asked questions. As a result, the blog becomes a destination website containing trusted information or advice that’s targeted, relevant, and easy to digest – a highly valuable resource for readers, and ultimately, a lead generating machine.

How to create a blog for your business

Include the blog on your main site

By using your existing business website to host the blog you take advantage of all the SEO benefits of blogging. It becomes an integral part of the site, linking to services and products where appropriate, and providing a coherent experience for users through logical and intuitive site navigation.

why are you blogging for your business? Consider the purpose 

Are you trying to become a respected thought leader, obtain more leads, or build an email list you can use to segment your target market? Your blog’s purpose will dictate how it’s presented, the topics you cover, and the call-to-action at the end of each post.

Keyword research

Think about what your customers search for, the specific search terms they use, and the issues they’re experiencing, and use this as the basis for your blog post titles. You’ll need to research the keywords and keyword phrases that relate to your business, and it’s advisable to avoid those with the highest competition as they’ll be difficult to rank for.

Keyword phrases of four to five words, perhaps including your geographical location if that’s an important aspect of the business, or a particular element of your service, can attract highly targeted traffic that ultimately drives sales.

Make a plan for your business blog

If you’re writing the blog yourself, consider how often you can blog. Writing, formatting, and uploading a high quality blog post will probably take longer than you think. You’ll also need to find attractive images, and ensure the posts are properly optimised, so don’t overload yourself at first.

Being consistent, even if that means only writing once a week, is more effective than starting with three blog posts per week and tailing off because you don’t have the time – consistency is key to strong results.

It’s advisable to brainstorm keywords and blog topic ideas to help you develop a content calendar, as this provides a framework for all your blogging activities. Setting this up before you start writing supports your efforts as you’re not constantly thinking about what to write next.

What’s your tone of voice?

Depending on the purpose of your blog, your tone of voice might be professional, formal, conversational, chatty and informal, or humorous. Your tone of voice should be a continuation of your brand, which you may already have established if you’ve been in business for a while.

Provide value by blogging for business

How you present your blog posts is important – don’t sell directly to readers through the blog, but educate and inform them about specific topics or issues. You could link to other reputable websites to help people learn more about a topic, but providing your own unique perspective and a little originality should help you establish a loyal following.

Promote your blog

Promoting your blog on your own social media platforms dramatically increases visibility and gets your message to a wider audience. You should also include social media sharing buttons so your content can be shared by others.

Considerations when blogging for business

SEO plugins

Search engine optimisation is an important element of your business blog, and it’s helpful to use the various SEO plugins that are available. If you’re using WordPress, Yoast SEO is a user friendly and popular plugin that uses a traffic light system to let you know how well your content is optimised.

It offers recommendations to improve search engine optimisation on each page or blog post, and there’s a Premium version with many extra features including keyword optimisation, and page previews for Facebook and Twitter.

business Blog structure

Organising your website and blog pages makes navigation easier and more logical for visitors, and will help to keep them on the site. Using pillar pages and topic clusters is just one strategy that can reap huge rewards in terms of visitor numbers and conversions.

A pillar page provides ‘cornerstone’ content about one of your services, products, or areas of focus – essentially, it contains information about every aspect of the overall topic, and is typically 2,000 words or more in length.

If you sell health supplements, for example, one of your pillar pages could cover everything readers need to know about vitamin D. Topic clusters are related individual blog posts that are shorter in length, but provide more detailed information on each aspect of that health supplement.

You link back and forth internally between your pillar page and each related blog post in the topic cluster. So taking vitamin D as an example, your topic cluster could include:

• Benefits of vitamin D
• How much vitamin D to take
• How to take vitamin D
• The foods that contain vitamin D
• How vitamin D interacts with other vitamins

….. and so on.

Pillar pages and topic clusters boost your SEO and provide in-depth, extremely valuable information to your readers – they’re just one way you can use your blog to build trust.

How frequently to blog for your business

It’s more effective to blog consistently, say once a week, rather than starting an unsustainable regime of blogging every day and then stopping when other business issues take priority. Regular blogging is challenging and time-consuming, so planning your content and how often you’ll publish really helps.

If you can’t commit to writing regularly for your business blog, you should seriously consider hiring a writer to blog for you. A good content writer will typically be able to take over the entire process if needed, from thinking of blog post ideas to writing them with an SEO focus, and then uploading to your website.

Coming up with blog post ideas is one of the first hurdles, but the pillar page/topic cluster method mentioned above could provide a multitude of blog post ideas. So let’s look at this in more detail.

Blog post ideas for your business

Pillar pages and topic clusters

Taking the pillar page example of a health supplement business that offers vitamin D, these are just some of the broad headings your pillar page could include:

• What is vitamin D and why do you need it?
• Where to get your vitamin D (food, supplements, sunshine)
• Benefits of vitamin D
• Potential health problems if you have insufficient vitamin D
• How much are vitamin D supplements?
• Does vitamin D interact with other medicines?

You’ll probably be able to think of more, but the general idea is to take each subheading and write about it in more detail within a single blog post. Crucially, you then link from the pillar page to the blog post and from the blog post to the pillar page.

Doing this makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website, as it’s well organised and logical with plenty of relevant links within the site. Given the length of pillar pages there should be a hyperlinked index at the top so readers can quickly navigate to the section they’re interested in, and a ‘back to top’ button in each main section.

Developing pillar pages and associated topic clusters takes time and planning, but the positive effect on organic search engine results and rankings can be dramatic.

Customer frequently asked questions/problems

Another way to generate ideas for your business blog is to base your posts on questions that your customers commonly ask, or on problems they’ve mentioned before. You can then provide the useful and relevant information they need, whilst boosting your credibility in the process.

Industry/business news or insight on your business blog

Although you may not want to write about industry news every week, the occasional post about what’s happening in your industry and your individual perspective or insight on the situation provides variety for readers.

You could talk about developments in your own business – if you’ve taken on new staff, for example, or made plans for the future. It helps to cement the relationship with your readers, and if it’s purely an online business, personalises communication.

What if you hate writing or don’t have the time?

There’s nothing worse than sitting in front of the computer without a clue about what to write, so here are a few ideas to help you if you hate writing or simply don’t have much time:

• Make a general outline of what you want to write about
• Think about what you want your readers to take away from your blog post – specific information perhaps, or a general ‘feeling’ such as hope or understanding
• Record your thoughts on your smartphone or other recording device to get you started
• Write what comes to mind about the topic and then edit later
• Limit distractions as much as possible
• Take your time – you don’t need to write the post in one sitting
• Use the Pomodoro technique – it’s surprisingly effective: write for 25 minutes and take a five minute break (this is one pomodoro). When you’ve completed four pomodoros, have a break for 15 minutes.

Do you need a content specialist to help you?

A professional content writer can take the pressure off you and consistently produce material that helps your audience. They’ll take the time to understand your customer base, what your customers are looking for, and exactly how you help them.

Given the undeniable benefits of business blogging, hiring a freelance writer is more of an investment than an expense. It brings rewards for the long-term and protects your business from being overtaken by competitors.

One word of warning, though – you might be tempted to use freelance marketplaces that are cheap for buyers but there’s no doubt that you get what you pay for in the writing realm.

Blogging for your business checklist

• Make sure your business blog is positioned on your main website
• Develop a content plan, including target keywords and phrases, blog post titles, and when you’ll publish each blog post
• Enable reader subscriptions to your blog to build your audience (and sales funnel further down the line)
• Publish blog posts regularly, but consistently – you can use a blog scheduling tool to automate this
• Include social sharing buttons so your content reaches a wider audience
• Include a call to action at the end of every blog post
• Segment and personalise your content using buyer personas
• Optimise your blog for mobile devices
• Think ‘SEO’ at all stages of developing your blog
• Include an author bio with a picture in each post to establish yourself as a thought leader and build trust

Blogging for business statistics

Statistics published by inbound marketing software specialists, HubSpot, show:

• 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing
• 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority
• Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13x more likely to see positive ROI
• Over 64% of marketers actively invest in search engine optimisation
• It’s possible to increase the number of monthly organic search views of old blog posts that have been optimised by an average of 106%

It’s clear that business blogging is a marketing tool too beneficial to ignore. So take the first steps today towards building your brand, connecting with customers, and increasing lead conversion – what topics will you blog about?

Do you already run a business blog or are wondering where to start? Why not use the Contact form or drop me a line to find out how I can help. I write about money management, debt management, budgeting, freelancing, and working from home.