Building Your Business Blog

There’s lots of advice out there in cyberspace for bloggers. Perhaps so much that it makes you feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony – you just don’t know where to start!

Sometimes it’s best to take a step back and simplify. Based on our experience over the past year or so with business-oriented blogs, here are a few basics that can help you get your business blog up and running successfully:

1) Define WHO and WHY – identify the target audience you want to engage and the purpose behind your blog. Who are you trying to reach and what are you trying to do? Are you blogging to build awareness, start conversations, gain customer insights for new products and services or network with industry peers? These definitions will help you focus on the topics you’ll cover, the questions you’ll pose and the way you’ll promote your blog.

Our blog, for example, is about public relations and social media, so we avoid posting my personal perspective on supermarket lines, rude waiters or Beyonce’s latest hit.

2) Gear the content for your audience’s needs, not your own – if your blog is pure sales pitch or self-promotion, you’ll turn your audience off. Consider your audience’s interests and needs, and cater to them – with insights, tips and topics that will help them in their daily professional (or personal) lives. And be sure to read the comments your readers post, respond to them and thank them for engaging.

Some of our most popular blog entries revolved around public relations tips, delved into social media topics or enabled readers to sound off about their pet peeves in PR.

3) Fill the pipeline – blogs are like newsletters. The first one is easy, but subsequent installments are tough. Make the commitment to stick with it. At the onset, develop a list of topics and an arsenal of at least five or six blog entries before you launch, so that you always have something ready to go. Have members of your team help you continuously grow the list with new topics or completed entries, seek out guest bloggers, and as you build a following, ask your audience for topics they’d like to see covered.

We often blog about questions we’re asked by clients, prospects or students … or about responses we receive in polling or surveying our colleagues in the PR/marketing world. 

4) Let your passion and expertise show – if you don’t truly know and enjoy the themes and topics you’re blogging about, it will show. Find someone in your company who is informed and inspired about the key topics, and enlist their help. Successful blogs are all about being human and authentic … and about connecting.

We try to let our love for the PR biz, our penchant to help others and our ability to laugh at ourselves show in our blog.

5) Persistently promote your blog – it’s going to take a while to build a following, so hang in there. It helps to promote your blog every way possible – with links on your website, company Facebook/LinkedIn page and Twitter feed, ads, sales literature, e-mail signatures, online discussion forums and links to related blogs.  Apply some basic search engine optimization with keywords and topic tag your blog post. Also, comment on other like-minded blogs in your category and include a link to your blog post when appropriate.

We’ve found that by promoting this way, we increased our number of monthly blog visitors by 25 times over the past year.

We still have a way to go, but the momentum is clearly there. It’s proving to be well worth all of our effort, and the same could be true for you.

For more tips on enhancing your blog, see this helpful article by Jeff Bulla: http://jeffbullas.com/2010/02/21/30-tips-on-how-to-make-your-companys-blog-rock/.

What suggestions or questions do you have about starting a business blog?