Starting a Blog for Your Business

Having a blog for your business is a great way to connect with customers, showcase your unique voice, and strengthen your expertise. When starting a blog, consider the focus and purpose, as well as some general requirements for ensuring your posts are valuable to your customers.

What are you trying to accomplish by beginning a blog? Consider the overall purpose. Are you looking to showcase your expertise? Perhaps generate leads or build an email list? The purpose of your blog will also help inform the voice of the posts. Is the direction of your blog more authoritative, academic, fun, or casual? Once this is determined you can start to shape what kind of posts to create. You want to post interesting, relevant, and keyword-optimized content geared toward your audience. Posting two or three times a week is ideal, but once or a week is better than nothing. It’s good to post at the same time each week.

Write about things that matter to your audience – both customers and prospects. If you are providing value in your blog, the sales will come. You will also want to consider how readers will take action. Increase awareness of your services or products with links back to relevant areas of your site. Or simply include an email “opt-in” for more information or a quote request. The links and call to action will vary depending on the content of each post but is essential in creating engagement with readers.

A quality post has some general requirements:

Good Headline – The headline should inform your readers to the post’s content, but don’t forget to keep key search terms in mind. You want it to be attention-grabbing, but not feel like clickbait. Give the readers an idea of what they will be reading. Be sure to include the main keyword(s) in the title in order to be recognized by search engines.

SEO –  Beyond your headline, the copy of the post needs to include those same keywords. You’ll want to take those keywords and include them as tags for your post to further help search engines. For those serious about blogging, we recommend having an SEO plugin installed such as WordPress SEO by Yoast (the most popular plugin) or SEOPressor Connect.

Content – Every post must be at least 300 words to rank with search engines, but blog posts with 1000+ words will rank higher. Make sure to edit your posts to ensure the post is free of spelling, grammar errors and has a good flow. An outline can help if you have a robust topic to cover. For really large topics, consider breaking it up into a series of posts. This is more digestible for your readers, and as a bonus, will provide more blog content. When reviewing the post ask these questions: does the post cover what the headline promised? And it’s always great to have another set of eyes on your article…pass it to a friend for a quick review!

Image – A good blog post should have at least one featured image in order to rank with search engines. Keep in mind the size of the featured image – an image that is 5 MB is too large for a website and will need to be modified. Having the image sized below 100 KB is for best mobile functionality. Images with text included are not ideal, as the text could be too small on a phone or tablet. Double-check the blog theme for the suggested dimensions of your image, as many force an image crop that could result in some information being lost. For those who need help with image sizing, we recommend using PicMonkey, a great tool used by many of our clients.

Once you’ve created your blog post, make sure it gets out there! Promote your post across social media and make sure it’s categorized on your site to create a resource library. A quality blog is a great tool to reach a new audience and connect deeper with current customers or clients.