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Blogs for SMBs

Importance of Corporate Blogging & Best Practices

By 6 Mins Read

Many people do not think a company blog is as important as content on social media platforms. Here’s a few stats that should make you think differently about corporate blogging:

–HubSpot, 2017

How corporate blogs can help every type of business:

Before we jump right in, we’d like to address a question of how blogging can help you regardless of the structure of your business.

1.  For lone freelancer web designer/developers, a corporate blog can, in a very cost-effective way:

  • establish credibility in the space you wish to target
  • establish a good base for SEO
  • Serve as a portfolio for your work

2. For small and medium businesses, in addition to the above,

  • It shows customers that your business is alive and kicking

3. For Web professionals with larger companies, your website blog:

  • Helps complement your social media presence with more high-quality content
  • Is a platform that is all yours–no other media company can control what or how you get your message across in your blog

Corporate blogging best practices:

1.  Have clear goals for your blog:

A blog is important but don’t start one without charting out a plan. What do you really want to accomplish with your blog? Is it to be a voice for company management, explain product information, build leads, etc?

 

2. Keyword research–write genuine content for people not search engines:

Once you have your goal in mind, use a good keyword research tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to look at the traffic that key terms that are involved in the goals for your blog, generate. This will :

  1. Give you an idea for the competition out there for your keyword
  2. Give you more ideas on what people search for relative to your keyword

While the keyword research is also important from an SEO point of view. Do remember not to write for search engines. Two important reasons that most SEO agencies fail to understand:

  1. Good content will always make it to the top of the search rankings i.e content that customers/readers love
  2. Search engines get more intelligent by the day. Google can easily tell when a piece of content has been stuffed with keywords and is unhelpful and will blacklist your website immediately

 

3. Content guidelines:

Modern web readers tend to first skim content to assess its value before either deep-diving into the content piece or moving on to other website. What can help increase viewing time on your blog? Catch your reader’s’ attention with:

  1. Don’t plagiarize. Not only will this be bad for you legally, but it can also destroy your SEO efforts. Copyscape is a good tool to use to ensure you don’t face any plagiarism issues
  2. Use large,good quality images
  3. Depending on your audience- funny or intelligent GIFs could be a nice touch
  4. Video insets elaborating on your topic (Be sure to optimize the video description as well)
  5. Use other content engagement tools. Apester has some good tools that you can insert into your blog to not only engage your audience more but also  get good insights into their thinking

  1. Readable font sizes and styles
  2. A good structure – in terms of headings, sub-headings,bullet points, large quotes,etc
  3. Don’t be afraid to link to other good content. Readers will appreciate the gesture, see you as genuinely wanting to share knowledge and will definitely watch out for your next blog
  4. Don’t ghost write for your company leadership. Writing from your own hand will come across as more genuine and have more touch and insights  than anything that a writer in your team can put forth. Plus, you may not think it, but readers can always tell the difference
  5. Be the blog that tells it like it is. Fight the fear of being honest. If something didn’t go right with a product,don’t try and hide it. They may not be very happy, but customers will at least learn to trust your word
  6. As hard as it will be-make sales take the back seat in your blog. Use your main website to pitch your product. In your blog, write about real,researched, valuable topics that will matter to your audience
  7. Be unique -Give your blog personality. No content on the internet today can afford to be boring or blend into the crowd

 

4. The best blog ideas will come from your customers:

Talk to your customers as often as you can to see what topics resonate with them and what they really need more information on and need more help with.

 

5. Tell your readers what your blog is about:

Build a good blog sidebar to capture email leads or spur sharing,describe your blog, its writers with links to their profiles and links to the best liked posts of all time.

 

6. Promotion plan for your blog:

Draw up a content calendar for your blog and share it with your writers along with topic ideas and keywords. There’s no rule here for how often you should churn out blogs, but publishing one at least once a week should be good. This also lets customers know that you are actively in the game.

 

7. Respond to all comments:

With all the work you put into getting content out there for your blog, it is impossible to miss comments by your readers. Make sure you set up email alerts to more than one person in your content team to ensure all comments and queries are responded to as soon as possible.

 

8. Don’t write in the dark:

Look at your analytics tools to see what the numbers say about your blog. What is your average viewing time, bounce rate, do heatmaps say that customers read through to the end, how many return viewers do you get, etc

 

9. Optimize and re-purpose old content:

While in a limbo about ideas for good content (or good writers), a good idea is to repurpose old blog content into shorter pieces or infographics to share on social media. Draw up a calendar to publish old content as well.

 

There. We hope our blog will help yours.


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