Business, corporate or company blog is a section on a website where you can find all blog articles. However, not every website has it. But, lately, it seems like this is a necessary part of a web presentation if a brand or a company wants to reach better visibility on the internet and more clicks to their website.
How does a business blog help? If you choose good keywords which are concerning your work and if you use them enough in your texts, which you are publishing on your blog, search engines will rank your website better and your potential buyers and clients will find you easily among many other similar companies.
But, if you believe that having a blog is not important for your business and that people will get informed about you through other communication channels and not through Google, you may be quite right.
Having a business blog or not depends heavily on these aspects:
- What is your business branch;
- What product or service are you offering;
- Who are your customers (or which customers you wish to attract if you are new on the market).
Should You Start a Business Blog?
How to know do you need a company blog? To answer this question, you should take note of all the aspects of your business from different angles.
Are you perhaps an owner of a local beauty salon or a mechanics garage? Are you maybe a founder of a law firm or are you running your dentist office? Or are you in the hospitality industry and operating a hotel or restaurant?
Who are your clients or customers? Are your customers mostly locals? Or do your customers come from all over the world? Or your customers are only locals, but you wish to spread the word about your business above and beyond?
Would you say that your customers are internet savvy? Are they using social media? Would they search for your business through the internet or social networks?
Do you sell some additional products besides your main one? Or are you just specialized in trade?
Are you satisfied with the current scope of your business or would you rather prefer to increase the number of your customers?
When you find the answers to all of these questions, you will have a better idea if the business blog is something you need.
What to Write for a Business Blog?
Let us say that you decided to finally kickstart your blog. But there is another set of obstacles in front of you. Does it seem to you that today everybody is writing and there is nothing else or new that you can add? If you are thinking along those lines, we need to tell you that you are in the wrong. It is quite possible to approach the same topic from different angles and to share your unique and individual experience.
First of all, when it comes to blog management, you will need to focus on writing articles which are strictly in correlation with your line of work. You can present your products or services inside those articles through calls to action which lead to your sales pages. This way you will attract potential buyers since they most probably visited your blog while looking for a product/service which you are offering. If you present your offer in detail, you will leave an impression of serious business and people will trust you more.
To paint a picture of your expertise, devote your time to writing explainer articles. Do not publish only promotional articles, since that will lure your readers away. You are allowed to use business jargon, but be careful not to use it too much. The best solution is to use simple terms and to explain things so that everybody can understand them, and not just colleagues from the industry.
Also, after posting a couple of articles on your blog, announce on your social media profiles that you have launched the blog. If you have a News section on your website, post the news about your new blog. Remember that whenever there is a new blog post you should share it with your followers on social networks. In this way, they will know that there is new content and by clicking the link from, for example, Facebook page, they will be directly transferred to your new blog post.
When your ideas run dry, you can start writing about the news from your industry. Try to create original content and do not copy the news word to word from another publication. Google will notice this if you do it, which can lead to the penalization of your website. Simply put, your website will not rank well in searches if you steal somebody else’s content. And that is something that you wish to avoid.
Interview prominent people from your industry. Prepare questions in advance and schedule an interview. Determine the direction you want the conversation to take, but leave space for that person to give their opinions and maybe lead the interview in another direction which you didn’t plan but which would open up new issues and space for further discussion.
You can also present your employees on your blog. You can do that in the form of articles which are formatted as an interview. Or your employees can write by themselves about their typical workday. You can also shoot videos which would create a more realistic image of your brand and the people behind it. When people know who is behind the cold corporate façade, it will be easier for them to connect with you.
What to do if you already wrote all of that and your inspiration is nowhere in sight? Ask your customers what they would like to see on your blog. You can do this via your Facebook status, Twitter update or Instagram story. In this way, you will get concrete answers from real people and you will see what is particularly of interest to them, what are they finding confusing or frustrating.
Whatever you write, try to make it meaningful and useful. Do not write just for the sake of writing and do not create your blog just because everybody has them nowadays.
Who Should Write for the Business Blog?
There are many examples of companies that do not have just one particular person in charge of writing. Everybody is a bit of a writer there and they are taking turns. This is a good tactic for having various content, especially is employees are working in different work segments. But the problem when everybody is writing is that it can lead to having articles of uneven quality. Also, some people may postpone writing their article because they are not finding much fun doing it or they are finding it hard.
If you feel that your employees are preoccupied with their work and do not have time to dedicate to writing, finding a person whose sole job would be writing and managing the blog would be a good decision. Also, since active blogs are noticed by Google and other search engines, you need to have a blog that will be updated regularly and not, let us say, once in three months.
It is a good idea to have a plan and strategy for a longer period when it comes to publishing articles on the blog. Avoid occasional and unplanned posting. Consistency is crucial when it comes to blog management.
Content writers are professional writers who are writing all sorts of texts intended for publishing on the internet. Besides writing blog posts, these writers can write texts for the rest of your website, for example for “About us” section, landing page and others. This written material is called “copy” and, therefore, these writers are called copywriters. Besides their writing talent, copywriters know how to edit, so the whole process of preparing texts is up to them.
Content writers also possess the knowledge about blog platforms, mainly WordPress which is the most popular one. Of course, for your blog and also your website to appear in the Google search, it is necessary to take care of the search engine optimization, SEO. When it comes to the SEO, you need to pay attention to links between your articles and links towards external sources, that is, other websites. Additionally, behind each blog post, there are is a lot of other settings that greatly affect its positioning on search engines. Whether your website will be on the first or the hundred and first Google page is of great importance for your business and it is up to you to decide if you will make an additional effort and invest more resources.
If you are present on social networks, content writers can also manage your profiles, share news and blog posts, answer questions from your followers and build your online image. It is necessary to manage these profiles since more and more people are getting informed through them. In some cases, social network profiles are better optimized than official websites and that people are visiting social network profiles more often. That is why it is important to be active there as well.
Conclusion
The easiest way to figure out if you need a company blog or not is to compile a list for it and against it. Think carefully about all the resources that are available to you and whether you want to invest them exclusively in the blog. Now that you are familiar with the basics of business blogging, you know that plenty of time, work and creativity are needed so that your blog would have quality content and keep your audience interested. A corporate blog is not like a personal blog, where you just need to sit down at the computer or a laptop and type out your thoughts and observations.
Managing corporate blog requires prior detailed research, keyword research, serious approach to article structuring and compulsory proofreading. Using a dictionary that is suitable for a business environment is also important. This is another of the many differences between a personal blog and a business blog.
If you think that you have everything you need and if you think that your blog will significantly improve your business results, just go ahead. If you are, however, unsure whether you can manage your blog yourself, you can always hire agencies that offer a professional blog writing service.
Do you have your business blog or are you planning to start it? What is your greatest concern? Write to us in the comments below or join the discussion on our Facebook page.
