Add a Little Spice
As a business, you might be afraid to add a little personality to your company blog. You may think the professional and straightforward approach is best. In certain industries that may be the case, but to stand out from the crowd you need to be different. Inject your writing with witty, personable, and even humorous language to get the ball rolling. Talk to your readers, not at them. Use compelling content to tell a story that attracts your targeted buyer personas. You don't want your blogs to read like stereo instructions, do you? Be human, be personable.
Be Passionate
It all comes down to passion. Do you want to write a blog post or don't you? If you don't enjoy what you are doing, your readers will be able to tell. They will be able to sniff out poor quality prose from a lack of creativity and personality. If this happens you'll ship will sink faster than a rock. Find inspiration anywhere you can.
You could find inspiration in competition. That drive to generate more traffic than your competitor will act like an 18oz Red Bull, giving your writing an injection of energy and passion. Go for a walk and think about what gets you excited. Is it white-sand beaches, beautiful art, candle light dinners? Whatever it is you are passionate about, weave it into your writing. For example, I love sailing. You'll see sailing reference throughout many of my blog posts. That passion helps my writing creativity by keeping things fresh and different.
Be Consistent
Blogging is not a sprint, it's a marathon. When starting a business blog, or any blog for that matter, it can take months to begin to see traffic results. This slow and gradual traffic process frustrates many businesses and they give up. The internet is littered with dead blogs that never figured out that slow and steady wins the race. Blogging consistently does a couple different things for you, it builds trust and regular readership. If people know you post every Tuesday and Thursday, they will become trained to look for your new content on those days. Blogging on a regular basis also trains the search engines to crawl your site more often, looking for fresh content. The more content you have, the more pages you will have available for visitors to land on.
Create a content schedule and stick to it religiously. You could choose to blog twice month, twice a week, every day--just be consistent. More often is better, just make sure the content is valuable and beneficial to your buyer personas reading it.
Build a Community
Social media platforms are a great way to build a following. They make it easy for you to share your content and allows people to engage with comments. Social media is another place for you to let your personality shine through. Give your brand a voice and engage with your social audiences. Post links directing to your content, then stir the pot to get some interaction on the post. Search engines are starting to look at social media signals when it comes to rankings. The more likes, comments, shares, retweets, and +1s you get on your posts the better. Google is watching!
Blog Titles - Take Your Time
Think of your blog titles as the gatekeeper to your content. A poorly written or boring headline will have readers running for the hills, and the back button. A creative and thought-provoking headline will intrigue readers, leading them through to the rest of your relevant content. Take your time when coming up with blog titles. Why spend an hour or two creating great content if your 30 second title can't intrigue people to click through and read the post. Spend at least 30 minutes coming up with 10 to 15 titles for a blog post. Say them out loud and gradually cross off ones that don't inspire action or provoke curiosity.
Collect Emails
Email just seems so 90's doesn't it? Well, it's not. Many so-called experts have predicted the death of email over the years, but guess what, it's still here and going strong. Email is the backbone of online communication and acts as a great delivery system for new blog content. Having an email subscription button on your blog is vital to growing your readership. Many people will subscribe this way, it's an easy way of getting notified each time new content is posted.
Make Content Easy to Digest
The attention span of a person can be related to that of a goldfish. People want instant gratification and they want it yesterday. If your title did a good job of pulling them in, your content better do a better job of holding their attention. Giving them quick bite-size chunks of information will help accomplish that. You can do that by:
Blogging and content creation can be an effective way to increase organic traffic and conversions, but it does take time and a solid strategy. If your business blog isn't gaining traction, has minimal or no engagement, or has a bounce rate a kangaroo would be jealous of, then putting some of the above tips into play should be a priority. For a more in depth look at business blogging, please download this free eBook for a strategy that gives your business blog that Red Bull punch!