It seems like everyone has a blog nowadays; is it worth creating a blog for your business? What would you even write about? Would people be interested in what you have to say? Is it worth the expense? Never fear; we have created the ultimate guide to business blogging to help entrepreneurs and new business owners with their blog.
Why Do I Need a Blog For My Business?
When considering all the tasks required to start a business, starting a blog may be at the bottom of your to do list. But, there are a lot of benefits of a business blog:
- Increases your SEO ranking
- Provides customers with the information they need to make informed buying decisions
- Increases customer engagement
- Creates a community around your products or services
- Builds trust and expertise
- Offers an avenue for “soft selling” through content marketing
- Repurpose blog content to use as a series of social media content
A blog does not need to be a huge undertaking. The most important thing is consistency; even if you post once a month, it is better than not blogging at all. Start small, and you can increase your blogging efforts as your resources increase.
What Should I Blog About?
Whereas a personal blog gives a lot of room for sharing whatever you want, you need to think of your business blog as a marketing tool. Just like you have a social media strategy, you should develop a strategy for your blog.
The foundation of a business blog strategy is to identify what would bring value to your customers and what your goals are for the business blog. In most cases, your goals would be something like:
- Educating or sharing expertise
- Providing value to your customers
- Selling something
Each of your articles or blog posts should serve one of the above purposes. By identifying the purpose of your blog and what would bring value to your customers, you can create a list of blog categories. For example, while we are a copywriting agency, we mainly work with small businesses or startups. That is why our business blog focuses mainly on sharing information about starting and running a business. The more business owners we have visiting our website, the bigger our pool of prospects. Our blog includes a sprinkle of copywriting advice to prove our expertise and knowledge, but our clients are business owners, not fellow copywriters, so it would not make sense for us to blog predominately about copywriting.
Similarly, if you sell silk hair accessories, you would quickly run out of things to talk about if you only talked about silk hair accessories. Instead, your blog could be about hair care. You would share hair care tips, hair tutorials, and within that, position silk hair accessories as the perfect way to look after your hair.
When you start a business, the advice is to niche down as small as possible so that you can position yourself as the go-to business. But, when it comes to business blogging, you should think a little wider. In addition to looking at what niche-related information your customers will find useful, find out what other related information they may need. So, we blog primarily about starting a new business and growing your business during your first few years in operation. But we also share productivity tips, marketing tips, and news because our ideal clients are also interested in those topics. By casting your net slightly wider when it comes to picking topics for your business blog, you increase the success of your SEO efforts and increase the chances of people finding your blog.
How to Come Up With Blog Topics
When you first start a blog, the best thing to do is to decide your categories and main tags first. This will be useful for deciding what to blog about. Think of your blog categories as topics and your tags as subcategories. If you were explaining your business blog to someone, what 4-8 topics would you tell them about? Those are your categories. So, for a travel blog, their categories may be the different continents or travel styles. For a fitness business, your blog categories may be recipes, client results, workouts, and health.
Your tags would break those categories down further into smaller topics so that your readers can fully explore a particular area of expertise. For the travel blogger, this could be countries. For the fitness business, they could break workouts down into cardio, weight training, flexibility and recipes into different diets like keto, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, etc.
Once you have these categories and topics, you can look at the list for inspiration on what to write. Think about how-to’s, industry news, and frequently asked questions.
If you get stuck for ideas, you can look to your customer base for inspiration. If you already have a following, post on social media requesting that they ask questions, and you will create a blog post answering them. Alternatively, visit forums to find commonly asked questions in your niche and write articles that address them. When you are doing keyword research, you can also find commonly searched questions surrounding your keywords.
I Don’t Have Time to Create a Business Blog
As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate, and a blog may not produce enough immediate results to warrant your attention. That is okay; you can outsource your blogging to a professional. We offer blogging packages that can ensure your business sees all of the benefits of a blog without sacrificing your time or energy.
We can oversee your blog strategy and your blog for you to maximise your results, or we can leave the strategising to you and write on the topics and keywords you provide. The choice is yours. Check out our blog package and other services here.