Business Blogging Tips for Every Industry

By Daniel Hickey

With the rise of social media for business, more companies than ever are establishing their presences on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest…and new platforms are being added all the time. This is great, but I always remind clients that in their efforts to conquer social media, they should not let their commitment to the company blog slide. Why is that? It’s because maintaining your blog or article section ensures that you:

Continue driving website traffic. Once clients know your basic business information, they may not have a need to return to your website – that is, unless you have a blog. With a regularly updated blog or article section that you promote on your social media accounts, you can repeatedly drive traffic to your website and maximize its effectiveness.

Maintain your SEO efforts. Blog content is one of the best tools available for moving your social media strategy forward. If you understand that refreshing your website content improves your performance in search engines, then consider this: Most businesses don’t update the content on their standard web pages more than once or twice a year. With a blog or article section, you can refresh your content weekly.

Give your audience something to engage with. Engaging content encourages two-way dialogue with the audience, especially when the content is promoted on your social media pages.  Remember, engagement is a powerful tool for converting social media followers into paying customers.

Now that you’re convinced, what should you blog about? Here are some ideas I recommend frequently to clients:

• Use customers’ frequently asked questions. Turning your most frequently asked questions into content on your blog can help answer questions that people are already asking.
• Debunk myths. Your blog or website article section is the best place to refute any myths that prevail about your business or industry.
• Give tutorials. Educating the audience in an engaging way helps you deliver an outstanding blog post or article, and you can incorporate images and video to make the content even more valuable.

I’ll close with two very important tips. In order to make your blog content as effective as possible, you should:

1.) Make articles at least 500 words whenever possible, and don’t exceed 800 words. Anything less than 500 words risks not doing well in search engines and anything over 800 may generate high bounce rates because it looks too lengthy for quick consumption. Somewhere between 500 and 800 is the sweet spot if your blog is designed to improve your SEO.

2.) Be consistent. To grow an audience, you must produce content regularly – just like a TV show, radio show or your favorite newspaper columnist. Think about it: It’s only easy to make these things a regular part of your routine when you know the time and date of the next episode, article, or broadcast. The same goes for your business’s blog.

Daniel Hickey is director of creative advertising at Hickey Marketing Group, based in Redlands, California. He can be reached at [email protected].