5 Things Blog Writers Should Do to Improve their Site

Sure, blog writers know how to write, and they do it well. Though, a lot of blog writers don’t fully understand business blogging and the proper way to do it. Here are a few things anyone who writes business blogs should know and follow in order to improve their website and attract more visitors to their blogs:

Integrate Your Blog with Your Website

One of the biggest benefits of business blogging is its impact on search engine optimization. Because each new blog article you publish creates a new web page that can be indexed in search engines to help you get found online, you really want your business blog to be associated with your main website. That way, any SEO juice you generate from your blog will automatically benefit your corporate website as well.

Don’t Publish Too Much Product-Centric Content If the content you publish on your blog is too heavily focused on you—your products, services, achievements, and why you’re awesome—and it’s seriously lacking thought leadership, then you need to cut down on this type of blogs. If people are visiting your blog expecting to find educational content and all they find is you talking about how great your products and services are, you’re not going to accomplish the same goals or attract as many readers as you would if you published educational industry content. Instead of creating product-focused content that is unlikely to get shared, consider spending more time on educational, data-driven, or especially thought-provoking content relative to your industry. This type of content has a much better chance of attracting readers and spreading. However, it’s okay to talk a bit about your product and services once in a while (basically 10% of your blogs).

Publish Frequently and Consistently Make a commitment to the upkeep of your blog. The most common frequency we observed for business blogging is weekly, so start by striving for at least one blog post per week and work your way up. If time or bandwidth is a major concern or deterrent for you, consider other ways to source content for your blog. Consider sitting down and creating an editorial calendar to keep you on track for regular publishing. Decide how many times per month you’d like to publish, then create a dedicated Google Calendar or an Excel document and mark off the actual days you will commit to publishing. Go one step further by planning the topics you will write about on those specific days, always keeping in mind your audience and considering topics that might line up with timely elements like upcoming industry events. Once you’ve worked your way into a regular blogging routine, consider increasing your blogging frequency.

Offer Content Variety

Variety is the spice of life, so start spicing up your blog by introducing content variety. Think outside the box, and brainstorm a style bank of different types of content you can create for your blog. The following are a few ideas to get you started:

• Text-based copy
• Charts or graphs
• Audio content (podcast content, interview recordings, etc.)
• Cartoons
• Infographics
• Guest blog articles (from other industry bloggers or experts)
• Curated lists
• Industry-related book reviews
• Q&As
• Videos (interviews, screencasts, instructional how-to’s, entertaining/funny videos, music videos, news-style videos, etc.)

Optimize Your Blog for Search The number of terms that a website can rank for is directly related to the size of the site. More often than not, the difference between a 50-page website and a 500+ page site is a blog. Because of this, blogging is an absolutely essential practice for SEO and traffic-building. More indexed pages mean more opportunities for keywords, so develop an SEO strategy for your blog and implement that strategy for every piece of content you create and publish on your blog. This requires identifying your keywords and optimizing blog content with those keywords.

Blog writers can truly improve their website and attract more visitors to their blogs by taking these simple, yet beneficial actions.

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