Your Business Blog – Doing It Right

Blogs are a great way to connect and build relationships with your potential clients. They give your audience a way to get to know you and your brand and to participate in your community. Of course, you want to maximize your use of this marketing tool and here are some tips to help you do just that.  First, there are features you really want to include on your blog in order to both grow your business and grow your blog following:

Subscribe or RSS feed. There’s nothing more frustrating for your potential customer than finding a blog they enjoy and not being able to subscribe to it. People are busy – too busy to remember to visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. Cut them a break, and help yourself as well, by offering an option to subscribe to your blog.  It is best to give choices so the visitor can have each new post delivered via email, sent to a reader or show up on their iGoogle page.

Contact/About information. Have you ever visited a blog and thought, “I wonder who this blog belongs to? Where are they? Who are they?” Trust me, most readers think this and they want to be able to answer those questions. If they can’t find out a bit about you, determine your credibility or make some sort of connection, they’ll move along. Retain your visitors by sharing a bit of information about yourself including your contact info.

Comments. Some blogs intentionally do not allow comments, but most people like to be able to leave a comment if they have something to say. This really matters if you are using your blog to build your business.  If you want to avoid spam, use a spam blockers like Askimet, which is available for WordPress blogs, instead of preventing comments. If you’re not allowing comments because you don’t want to respond to them, consider outsourcing the job and having someone moderate your posts, or just set ten minutes aside at the end of each day to respond. People like the interaction and it draws more readers and helps your business and your blog grow.

Archives, popular posts, popular comments, tags and other associated identifiers. People search and read blogs differently. Some simply read the most recent post and move on while others search by category or tag. Some people will want to read the most popular posts and others will want to sift through your archives post by post. Provide a number of options for your visitors to search by.

SEO plug-ins. One of the wonderful features about a blog is that they are very popular in the search engines because of frequent and easily indexed content. You’ll want to use any one of the many quality search engine plug-ins that optimize your posts for search engines.

Social networking and bookmarking features. With Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and other social networking and bookmarking sites growing in popularity, it pays to include options on your blog. You can ask people to tweet your posts, post or link to them on Facebook, Digg them and so on. These buttons, widgets and options will draw traffic and subscribers.

Google Analytics. You want to know how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, how many posts they read and how long they stay on your site, right? Google analytics will tell you all that and more. To make good decisions about how to grow your blog, it pays to have the kind of information an analytics tool can provide.

Now that you know the components you need for a successful blog, you also need to get your content read.  Compelling posts pull the visitor into your blog where they’ll continue to search for more valuable content. They will begin to not only remember your blog as a source of good content, but they will also think of your business as important and reliable.  Here are four tips to get your blog posts read:

Compelling Headlines

Your headline is the first thing that your visitor or reader will notice. It must grab their attention by appealing to their emotions, making a promise, offering a benefit, inciting controversy, arousing curiosity or stating something newsworthy. Spend time to create a powerful title.

Layout

After that compelling title, how you present your content is the next important factor in getting your article read. Articles that are heavy with long paragraphs are often skipped. Even though the  reader may be interested in the content, they are not likely to slow down to read dense prose.

In general, people tend to skim when they read online, and an article that is difficult or cumbersome to read won’t be read. Instead, use shorter paragraphs and short sentences.  Formatting styles that include bold type, bullets or numbers, and subheadings will help your reader make a decision to read your article.

Intro Paragraph

Your intro paragraph is next in line in importance to getting your article read. It should be short and to the point, yet still compelling. Your intro paragraph is used to set the stage for the rest of the article. It’s where you let your potential reader know what you’re going to tell them.

Use Images

Photos, graphics and illustrations come next. For some reason we’re attracted to content with images. Maybe it’s because it breaks up the content or maybe it’s because a few good images can help you tell your story. If you can include relevant images in your content, it will draw the eye of readers and encourage them to read on.

You can get more ideas for utilizing your blog well and building your business at Solopreneur.Biz.   Most popular there is the free copy of Biz Tips: The Book with more than 50 more ideas for growing YOUR business.  Janet Slack is a business coach who specializes in working with small business owners and solopreneurs on business growth. She extends special thanks to Becki Noles of Virtual Accuracy for her assistance with this post.