12 Simple Ways To Make Your Business Blog More Successful

Improve Your Business Blog With These 12 Tips

Improving your business blog takes some effort, but not as much as you would think. If you want more traffic to your site, blogging is an excellent tactic to use if done correctly.

Sure, anyone can setup a blog and start publishing content however that doesn’t mean they will have business success with it.

It depends on what your business goals are and how an active blog may help you achieve those goals.

Blogging can be great if you want to position yourself/your brand as a thought leader in your industry. Blogging can be a great way to increase exposure for your brand and bring more traffic to your site. More traffic means more potential customers. Really good blog posts can also naturally attract backlinks from other websites when someone decides that your post is good enough to reference.

There are so many ways to improve your business blog. In this article you can read 12 simple ways to make your business blog more successful.

1. Write About Topics to Help Your Audience

Say you run corporate health and wellness programs. Write your articles about the productivity benefits that come with having an engaged and productive workforce and offer tips on how employers can boost their workforce productivity. Also cover the problems that many business owners encounter when their staff are sick, unmotivated and performing poorly.

Ask yourself the question:how will this article help my audience?

Even if your blog posts are well-written and provide an interesting take on a topic, if they don’t meet the needs of your audience, they are next to worthless. The best business bloggers know that for their articles to have the greatest impact, they need to address interests, needs, problems and challenges.

2. Make Your Content Visible to Search Engines

What is the point of writing an excellent article if no one reads it? You’ll want to optimise your content so that search engines find it, rank it and show it to searchers. This is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Search engines are basically algorithms that sort through many millions of webpages to find the most relevant search results. When optimising your blog post, be sure to address the following technical SEO points:

Technical SEO gives your content the best chance to rank.

a. Page title. Make sure your page title includes your keywords. In the image below the title includes the target keywords ‘chiropractic keyword research‘.

b. Page heading. Repeat your page title in your page heading. The image below shows you the target keywords being used in the page heading.

c. Heading tags. Use H1 or H2 tags in your master headings and H3 tags for sub headings. The main heading on this page uses a H1 tag.

d. Image title, alt text and file name. When uploading images to your blog, make sure you fill out the image title and alt text. The feature image for the blog in the image below was uploaded to the website with the file name ‘chiropractic-keyword-research’ and the image alt and title text also included this phrase.

e. Keywords and semantically related search phrases. Add keywords and related words throughout your article.

f. Internal links. Link to other relevant pages in your site.

g. External links. Link out to high authority reference or resource sites.

3. Write for People, Not Search Engines

In addition to the technical components of SEO, you must also focus on creating content that gives value to your audience. Here is how you do that.

a. Write articles for people, not search algorithms. Write blog posts that solve problems, offer advice, tips, tricks or cover an issue in great detail. Anyone can write a 200 word blog post, apply technical SEO, and wonder why their post doesn’t rank. You should aim to provide real value to your readers and focus on publishing high quality posts less often, not brief or thin posts frequently.

b. Write longer articles, not shorter. Studies indicate that articles containing over 1,200 words tend to rank higher than those with less words. That means when you write your next blog post, be prepared to cover your topic in enough detail that you write more than 1,200 words of useful and informative content.

c. Cover a topic in considerable depth. Look for related searches in Google and add these as new paragraphs to your blog. Add a question and answer section where you set out a series of commonly asked questions on your topic at hand and then provide a series of informative and thought out answers. Consider discussing opposing points of view to give your readers a broad understanding of your topic or to enhance the context of your argument.

4. Keep Your Paragraphs Short

Long paragraphs are the quickest way to bore your readers who will eventually leave to find something else that’s easier to read. Unless your blog offers valuable information that readers can’t do without, it is highly unlikely that long paragraphs will impress them.

Consider the following formatting points:

• Blog posts are typically written in conversational tone
• Break up your content with headings and sub headings
• Use bullet points and lists to display facts or short points (like these bullet points)
• Use short sentences and short paragraphs

Note the white space and short paragraphs.

Take newspapers for examples. All newspapers make sure their content is easy to read by using enough white space between their columns and by keeping paragraphs short and to the point.

5. Avoid Switching from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Perspective

Switching between first, second, and third perspective is a relatively common mistake that requires a keen eye to spot. If you go from writing ‘I’ to ‘You’ to ‘A Person’, you are probably guilty of this. It can be hard to spot, which is why you need to check your paragraphs individually for the perspective they are from.

6. Don’t Make Silly Spelling Errors

The best way to avoid making spelling mistakes is to nip it in the bud i.e. when you are writing. Be sensitive to spelling mistakes such as form and from, its and it’s, their and there, etc. Occasional slips won’t cost you too many readers but repeating the same mistakes constantly will annoy some people.

7. Don’t Use Txt Talk

Txt talk refers to the language used on mobile devices for the purpose of saving character space as well a making writing quicker and easier. It has its uses and place on mobile devices but definitely not on your blog. It actually makes it harder for people to read your content.

The people that read your blog have been reading since they were young children to the extent that they can actually glance at text and understand its meaning without the need to read it physically. However, txt talk requires thought to interpret it, which is why you should avoid using it.

Exmaples of txt text to avoid include:

• Lol (laugh out loud)
• Brb (be right back)
• Msg (message)
• U (you)
• Atm (at the moment)

8. Proofread Your Posts 4 Days Later

If you have just written a blog post it can be hard to look at it critically. The text will probably be still fresh in your mind and you will have a harder time reading the text without skimming through it. However, if you look at the text several days later you will need to read each line, which means that you will be more likely to find more of the errors that you missed the first time.

Some people find it hard to proof documents on a screen so if this is you, print out your articles before you publish them and proof read from a hardcopy.

Another tip is to read your blog post out aloud. Proofreading aloud helps with grammar, avoids awkward word placement and sounds out repetitive wording.

9. Proofread Line after Line

It might seem somewhat excessive considering that it is a blog post and perfection isn’t a requirement. Still, you will find a significant improvement in the flow of your writing as well as the overall quality if you concentrate on a single line at a time when proofreading. You can even try cheap online proofreaders to help you pick your mistakes. If you want some more tips, check out these from nPower.

10. Check for Contradictions

You must never forget to check the content/message of your blog post. It is easy to contradict yourself in both subtle and glaring ways and still be unaware of it because you proofread the text without noticing the content or theme. Do you claim not to be present but then describe part of what was happening in first person? Do you claim that the incident upset you while also mentioning how much you laughed about it?

11. Share Your Blog Posts Via Social Media

Use emoticons, numbers, line spacing and images/video for maximum impact.

So you have just written an excellent business blog post but what is the point if no one reads it? There are two parts to making your business blog better: the first is to write excellent content and the second is to promote the blog so that people actually find and read it.

Take your blog URL and share it via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google My Business (if you are a local business) and any other platform where you think your customers may hang out. Include a short preview about the blog or give a reason why someone should click on your link to read it. It’s always better to think outside the box as an unusual or thought provoking social media post is more likely to get more clicks/engagement then a boring ‘read my post here’ line.

Always include an image with your blog post as social media posts with images get a higher click through compared with posts that are text only (video gets even more engagement then images).

12. Use an SEO tool

Use free or paid SEO tools like Ahrefs to perform content and keyword queries. You can discover thousands of great keyword ideas, find out how difficult they are to ranking for and calculate their traffic potential.

You can also determine if it’s feasible to write a blog on a particular topic or targeting a certain keywords based on it’s ‘keyword difficulty’ score. This metric helps you to determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 search results for keyword ‘X’. The score is from 1 to 100, with 1 being the easiest and 100 being the hardest.

Wrap Up

There are lots of other ways you can make your business blog successful but if you take the x12 tips in this blog post, you will be well on your way to producing much more engaging content. Blogging and content marketing is a medium to long term investment strategy that takes time and energy to do right.

If you want to boost your content marketing efforts contact Orion Marketing today and we can advise you on the best way to succeed. You can also get a free website audit here to learn if a marketing strategy customised to your budget and your business is required.

Marshall Thurlow

Marshall Thurlow is Director and Founder of Orion Marketing Pty Ltd. He is a digital marketer with expertise in SEO, website design, content marketing and project management. With over 15 years of experience spanning government, not-for-profit and the private sector, he is well equipped to lead teams to success. He is a big proponent of environmental sustainability, critical thinking and progressive issues.