Blogs are great ways to boost your business, but here are 7 vital things to think about before your business starts to blog.

Does Your Business Need To Blog

Ingrid Cliff is a freelance writer and the Chief Word Wizard of Heart Harmony – a writing services studio that helps put your business into words. For a free copy of the “7 Secrets of Compelling Copy & Powerful Words” visit her website http://www.heartharmony.com.au

Blogs are a great way to build your brand, escalate your search engine results and communicate with people. But before you go all gung-ho and set up a blog here’s a few tips to think about.

1. Why do you want to blog?

This is biggie. You need to work out where blogging fits into your overall marketing strategy. You need to know why exactly you want to blog and what specific outcome are you trying to achieve. You need to work out what sort of readers you want to attract and what you want them to take away from your blog before you put your first keystroke on the page.

2. Do you have the resources to blog?

Blogging is a significant time commitment. The reason blogs work for search engines are they are usually full of regularly updated fresh content. The internet is littered with blogs that have lots of posts in the first week, a few the next, one the following and then nothing for 12 months. You need time and resources to blog effectively.

The best bloggers have a regular writing schedule so people begin to expect to see posts from that company and look forward to reading them. The regularity depends on you. Some top bloggers write one long post a week and two smaller posts. Others write daily quick posts. Still others write just one post a week. Work out what your posting schedule is going to be and stick to it.

If you want to share ideas on an irregular basis you may be better off setting up an article site rather than a blog. That way you are still sharing ideas, but you are not stuck into a set routine.

You also need to allocate physical resources to writing the posts. This can either be one person in the company writing the blog posts or you can outsource the writing of your blog posts to companies such as ours. The important thing is that you post regularly.

You can use technology to make the most out of your time, so you are not manually uploading posts each day you want your blog to appear. Blog platforms such as WordPress allow you to upload posts and to schedule their release to certain days and times. It pays to load a pile of posts at once and then let them run.

And if you want maximum readership some studies have shown that releasing your post at about 11am will give you the best results.

3. What are you going to talk about?

Each blog needs a tightly focussed theme. The most effective blogs have a theme that is broad enough to encompass the range of topics your business is involved with, but narrow enough to make it clear to readers what you are “on” about.

In terms of post length the length depends on what you want to say. Some bloggers focus on quick updates of less than 500 words to share their information. If you want to position yourself as an expert then a long article style post full of rich information may be a better option.

4. What is your blog “voice”?

Each good blogger has a distinct writing “voice”. Each of their styles is as unique as a fingerprint. It pays to work out what your writing voice is going to be. Are you chatty or formal? Do you use colloquialisms or jargon? Are you warm and friendly or more reserved? Whatever your voice you need to communicate this to the people writing your posts for you.

5. Get the SEO bits right

If you are going to do a blog, you may as well sort out the SEO side of things for maximum search engine results. This means having your keywords in your blog title, in your post titles, in your categories and blog tags, scattered throughout your content and ideally the last part of every post. Get a clear list of the keywords you are targeting and ensure your blog writers know how about them.

6. Determine your interaction strategy

Not all bloggers encourage interaction. A number of the world’s top bloggers turn off their comments section. They just want a platform to share their ideas. If you are in business you need to work out how you want to encourage discussion and interaction.

I recommend moderating every single comment to start with, the reason being blog spam is more prevalent than email spam. All it takes is one comment full of links to Viagra sites and you could affect your search engine results. If you have comments allowed, you must also install Akismet to help filter out the spam comments otherwise you will spend hours each day manually deleting all the spam comments.

7. Get your legals in place

If you have a blog, you need some rules to govern behaviour, posting and your moderation of posts. I also recommend checking with an IT lawyer to help determine your company blog rules and the best way to let people know of your rules.

So, blogging is certainly a great business communication strategy. But like all strategies a little bit of planning will take you a long way to achieving success.

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