5 Do’s and Don’ts for Your Business Blog

There’s no doubt that creating a business blog is essential for growing your business’s online presence. Creating a blog can increase customer awareness, generate leads, and improve SEO. In fact, according to hubspot.com, B2B marketers that use business blogs generate 67% more leads than those who don’t have a blog. Also, business blogs that are active have 97% more links to their websites and they were also indexed 434% more often.

If you are still in doubt on how important business blogging is, this article contains many other reasons to validate the decision to focus on business blogging. However, just because a blog is present does not mean that that is enough. There has to be valuable content on your blog in order to attract customers to it.

Creating valuable content does not have to be hard. We have created a short list of do’s and don’ts for you to keep in mind when creating your business blog’s content.

Do’s

1) Do Know Your Audience

It’s absolutely essential for you to know what your target audience is looking for and tailor your content towards them. If the company is associated with air cooling, then you are not going to want to write about food on your blog. Those that come to your blog are going to want to know more about different types of air cooling information. If the content that is created is tailored to them, they’ll come back to your blog. That will increase the chance of the visitor turning into a lead.

2) Do Be Professional, but Still Friendly

There is no reason to be stiff and formal. Formality belongs in academic papers, not in a blog post. It’s also important to write as yourself. You want your readers to feel as if you are talking to them and you can’t do that with a stiff, disconnected writing style.

3) Do Keep Paragraphs Short

This goes against everything your high school English teacher taught you but you must keep paragraphs short. You want to aim for 3-4 sentences. If not, you will lose readers and leads. Many times, readers will merely skim through the content and if they see a large wall of text that they can not skim, most likely they will just leave.

4) Do Be Direct

Get to the point as quickly as possible when writing business blog posts. Again, readers like to skim and find the information they need quickly. Creating content that is round-about will not help you gain customers but will likely cause you to lose them.

5) Do Research

Stay up to date with all that is going on in your industry. Read other articles and become more knowledgeable about the topic on which you are writing. Not only will you be more knowledgeable but you can also link to the articles read as an SEO tactic.

Don’ts

1) Don’t Cover Too Many Topics

If the blog post is covering a huge topic, try breaking it up into several articles and creating a series. If the post becomes too long, visitors will not want to read the whole thing. In addition to that, too much information at one time will be confusing.

2) Don’t Write in Run-On Sentences

Run-on sentences are hard to read. You want your content to be easily read, understood, and connected with. Don’t make your readers work harder to understand what you are trying to convey. If they are confused, they will likely go to another business’s blog to get the information that they need.

3) Don’t Forget to Edit and Proofread

This is an absolute must when writing a business blog. In addition to generating leads, business blogs are supposed to help with setting up a business as an authority in their industry. If the blog post is not well-written and mistakes are present, then it reflects badly on the business, not just the blog.

4) Don’t Try to Sell On Your Blog

Blogs are not online commercials or advertisements. Blogs are a place where your current customers and potential customers can go to gather information. They are not looking at a blog to find an ad. However, you can include links to your business pages so readers can link directly to your products. However, only use those links when they are appropriate and connect with the topic of the post.

5) Don’t Give Up

Blogs, in general, are not successful overnight and business blogs are no different. They take time to develop and grow. The more content you create and post, the more visits your blog will have.

Blogs are an effective tool at growing your business but they have to be done well. Remembering this list of do’s and don’ts will help your business blog get off its feet and succeed.