Business blogs can greatly benefit businesses of all sizes, from solo practitioners to massive enterprises. You may have considered starting a business blog. If not, you should!
While business blogs represent a low-cost, long-term element of successful brand-building, they require planning and thought. If you have wondered about starting a business blog, here is what you need to know to succeed.
Business Blogs Require Commitment
Any successful blog requires commitment. The internet is littered with abandoned personal blogs from the “LiveJournal” era prior to 2010 or so.
It is all too easy to enthusiastically set up a blog and write the first few posts. But maintaining a good pace along with high-quality content requires sustained discipline.
Before you set up a business blog, ask yourself
- Do I have plenty of topics and subtopics to write about?
- Do we have time and resources to devote to regular blogging?
- Will we do the work to learn what readers want and address it?
- Are we willing to look at the analytics and learn how to improve continuously?
- Can we persevere through the times when writing a post feels like a slog?
You need most if not all of those answers to be “Yes” if you want your business blog to succeed.
Bear in mind also that your very first blog post and the one you write a year from now may be significantly different in look and feel. Nailing the tone, length, and voice right off the bat is rare.
All that said, business blogs can become a tremendously valuable business asset over time.
Blogs Have Evolved into an SEO Master Tool
While the personal blogs of yesteryear have turned into accounts on Instagram and TikTok, blogs themselves have not gone away. If anything, they have become better.
Business blogs have become one of the most powerful tools a business can have — as long as the business posts regular, high-quality, relevant content. And blogs can be one of the best SEO vehicles a business website can have.
What a Business Blog Can Do
The main thing business blogs do is drive traffic to company websites. From this, many other benefits arise.
Business blogs build trust with the reader, and they are an outstanding way to “humanize” your business. People who read your business blog feel like they really get to know your business and its values.
They are also terrific for updating your website with fresh, original content. This is something that search engines reward and is a fundamental part of SEO.
In addition, business blogs deliver other benefits, such as
- A boost for building your email list (especially if readers can sign up right from any blog post)
- A basis for social media content. Cross-pollination between blog posts and social media posts benefits both!
- Attracting new leads and customers. Strong calls to action in blog posts help this process.
- Educating readers on topics that matter to them
- Inspiring your audience to tackle problems
- Indirectly documenting the history of your business activities
The overarching benefit of business blogs is a healthier bottom line for the company.
One Key to Success is Planning
One of the main reasons for all the “dead” personal blogs that have accumulated on the internet is the lack of planning. Too many bloggers imagined sitting in front of a keyboard and watching content come pouring out of it.
While that may work on occasion, or during the first flush of excitement over a new blog, it doesn’t last. With business blogs, in particular, planning is essential to success.
Some companies plan an entire year of blog content and more or less stick to it. Many companies find that a quarterly content plan makes more sense by allowing more flexibility.
With certain types of businesses, like B2C consumer goods businesses, planning the fourth quarter of a given year will include plenty of holiday-themed content. But that’s not necessarily the case with a lot of B2B businesses.
Before committing to business blogging, create at least one-quarter’s worth of content ideas. When the person writing blog posts knows the topics in advance, the process is infinitely easier.
With blogging, as is the case with many other endeavors, the effort you make upfront facilitates all the other steps of the process. Don’t be tempted to “wing it” with business blogs.
Many Business Blog Tools Exist
Blogging has become established enough that the pitfalls are well-known. Finding strong, relevant topics, creating captivating titles, and choosing the right keywords can be difficult. Fortunately, many tools exist to help with these challenges.
Better still, many of these tools are free, or at least offer free versions. The following table lists some (though nowhere near all) popular tools that help writers of business blogs every day.
| Tool | How It Can Help |
| Blog Title Generator | Creates blog titles after you feed it your keywords |
| Ahrefs | Keyword research and competitor analysis |
| Yoast SEO for WordPress | A WordPress plugin that helps you fulfill each blog post’s SEO goals |
| BuzzSumo | Shows you the most popular blog posts on a given topic |
| Click to Tweet | WordPress plugin that helps readers instantly tweet selections from your blog post |
| Unsplash | Huge source of free, high-quality photos of just about anything you can imagine |
| Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator | Generates a blog post topic from the keywords you give it |
DIY or Outsource Business Blogs?
Not every business with a successful blog actually writes every post. While some companies want to keep blogging in-house, others outsource blogging with the aid of content providers.
Naturally, businesses must select their blog content provider carefully. They must be willing to invest time and money into getting the topics, tone, and voice just right. But once they do, they can leave the blogging to an expert and focus on other things.
Best Websites builds websites for businesses that need a website but have neither the budget for a high-priced web designer nor the skills in-house for the project. Every site that Best Websites creates is enriched with SEO from the start.
Moreover, Best Websites can develop a content plan with clients to include site upgrades and blog content. Don’t let your company miss out on the many advantages of business blogs. Schedule a call with our team and let us help you build the online reputation and business volume you need for success.