If you run your own business and you’re using a blog for marketing and relationship building purposes, when is the last time you really evaluated how well that’s working out for you? Steve offers some good ideas to review where you’re at and where you’re going with your blog. Happy reading!
Anyone involved in corporate business will have realized the benefits a regularly updated blog can bring. They are a great, semi-informal way of keeping both present and potential customers and clients up-to-date with your business and are a superb platform for announcing new products and services. But like everything on the Internet, they can all too easily stagnate.
If it has been a while since you took a step back and cast impartial eyes over your blog, take a little time to make sure your blog is still doing everything for your business it was intended to do when it first began.
Start at the beginning and have a look at the blog design you’re using. It may have been a good choice when the blog started, but how is it holding up? Is it looking tired? It may be that there’s nothing wrong with the template, except that it’s now being used by many more people. If this is the case, it is time to move on. Blogs that look too generic can cause browsers to think less of your company, whether the website content is good or not.
As in all business, it’s important to stand out from the crowd, so make sure your design does just that. To this end, you may want to consult a business blog writing service that will be able to offer many constructive suggestions to help reinvigorate your blog.
Once you’re satisfied that the template and design are where you want them to be, it is time to look at the content. Because this is clearly the most important element of the blog, there are a number of key points to consider.
- Make sure the content is interesting. Sometimes easier said than done, it is nevertheless vital that you take the time to get this right. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, it will keep your readers coming back so that when you want to announce a new service or product, you can make contact with the highest number of people possible. Secondly, great content will help hook anyone who is just browsing and help ensure they become a regular reader.
- Look at how you layout your content. Use of headings is a great aid to being found by search engines, but only if you think carefully about the words used. The key here is to be as specific as possible. So if you are a specialized apple provider, use words that are unique to your product and specific terms such as “specialized apples” and stay away from terms such as “new fruit”.
- Make sure the content is well written. It should be as jargon-free as possible and accessible to people with different levels of knowledge.
Finally, one of the areas where many blogs fail is their focus. General blogs often fail to please anyone. Look for a specific topic or angle on your business and stick to it. This will keep people coming back, help boast your reader numbers and ensure that your blog is working as hard for you as you are for your business.
Steve Lazuka is the owner of Interact Media, a website content marketing firm based in Ohio. His knowledge of content writing and experience has proven successful for both clients and his own site. He also writes on his company blog and provides useful information for fellow marketers.