Are you blogging as part of your business’s social media marketing plan? Leveraging blogging offers many benefits to help grow business. Blogging boosts your visibility and can be instrumental to organic (free!) search engine optimization to increase traffic to your website, improving your credibility, and establishing you as an expert in your field. The kind of content you self publish through your business blog can make a big impression on your current and potential customers. It’s important that you produce top quality blog content as it represents your business. To help you craft the best business blog content possible, we’ve put together a list of absolute dos and some honest don’ts.
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing: Select Topics You are Knowledgeable About
You want your readers to view your blog as a reliable and authoritative source of information, so only put out posts that you are informed and confident about. Identify what topics you have knowledge and expertise in. What is your background? What have you learned from your professional experience? What topics are you excited or passionate about? What content and topics would be valuable for your readers? If people are taking the time to read what you have to say, they are expressing trust in you, your opinion, and your business, so don’t betray that trust by giving them faulty or inaccurate information.
Of course, if you only write about things you’re an expert on right now, you will sooner or later run out of topics. That’s why it’s important to continually be researching and expanding knowledge in your field. Keep up with the latest news and pay attention to updates and changes. Explore different facets of your niche and educate yourself on them. The more you know, the more you can write about and share with others, thus boosting your credibility and authority in your field and making yourself more valuable to your customers.
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing: Find Your Focus
Once you’ve identified and made a list of potential topics you feel confident writing about, it’s time to find the focus of your post. Each post should have an angle, and typically the more specific the better. Don’t try to cover too much in a single post. Take a look at your topic list and identify which topics can be covered in one post and which are broad enough to be broken up into different posts. Some topics may even turn into a series. For example, as social media marketing agency, we write a lot of blog posts about blogging. But instead of writing a lot of broad, generalized posts, we like to break it down into smaller chunks, like our post on How to Write a Great Blog Post Introduction. Be creative in finding unique angles that will hook your readers and give them original information they haven’t already read a hundred times before.
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing: Write Well
After you’ve found a topic and a focus, the most important aspect of blog writing is, unsurprisingly, good writing. Your writing should be not only interesting and knowledgeable, but should exercise good style. Be engaging, develop a sense of voice, and create interest by mixing up your sentence length and structure. Know the rules of grammar and punctuation, and make sure you’re using those tools correctly. Remember that even though you want to appear as an authority on your subject, it’s essential that your post has good readability, so maybe save the showy vocab words and lengthy, complex sentences for another time. Practice reading your writing out loud to yourself and identify any awkward spots.
If you can have someone else review your writing for you, even better. Putting in the extra effort will make the reading experience far easier and more pleasant on the other side of the screen. If you can afford an editor, this will be well worth the investment.
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing: Publish Often
In order to stay relevant, appear in search searches on Google, and keep providing content to drive traffic, you have to publish often. We know that when things get busy, it’s all too easy to let your blog fall through the cracks, but consistency is key in this. We recommend creating a blog calendar and schedule to keep yourself on task. Make deadlines and due dates for drafts, edits, and publishing. Schedule your topics and upcoming posts weeks or even months ahead to save you time on knowing what to write. The more often you can post, the better, so figure out what’s achievable for you, whether it’s once a week or once a month, and then organize your tasks and schedule to accomplish your goal. Just remember it’s not worth sacrificing quality over quantity. You’re better off posting a well researched and well written post once a month than a shoddy post every week.
Do’s of Business Blog Post Writing: Do Promote Your Work
Once the posts are written and published, it’s time to get them in the spotlight and give them the attention they need. The more people who see your blog, the more opportunity you have to drive traffic to your website, gain customers and clients, provide SEO value, and create loyal followers. To learn more about how to optimize your blog post for SEO, read our post here. You can also promote your blog posts by sharing them across your business’s regular social media channels and drafting messages that highlight your new posts. Whether it’s in a Facebook post, a tweet, or an Instagram bio, get that link out there and in front of readers. You’ll also want to be sure to share them more than once. We like to send out a succession of messages promoting our post right after publication, then we will share again every few weeks in the months following.
Now that you’ve got the most important “Dos” of business blog writing, let’s go over a few of the “Dont’s”…
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing: Don’t Copy or Plagiarize
This one should be obvious, but it is always worth repeating. Plagiarizing is never ok. Does that mean you should never look at anyone else’s work and only write directly from your own opinions? Of course not. We read other people’s blog posts all the time for research and inspiration. What’s not ok is directly stealing other people’s words and ideas. Copy and paste has no place in your writing or anyone else’s.
It’s worth saying that even if you did obtain permission to copy other people’s words, imitating already existing content will definitely hurt you more than help you. When you copy the same wording, no new SEO value is added. Google can identify direct copies immediately and will penalize you, so in order to avoid your SEO being penalized, focus on adding your own unique content that will actually stand out.
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing: Don’t Forget to Proofread
You can argue that good editing is just as important as good writing. You may have a great blog post, but if you have a couple glaring typos or punctuation errors, you can undermine the integrity of your piece. Your readers won’t trust someone who doesn’t care enough to proofread their own work. It just looks bad. So take the time to run a spellcheck, make sure your wording is clear and makes sense, and watch your grammar. For more tips on how to be your own best editor, click here. However, if you have others around you that can review your writing, we highly recommend you have them do so. We tend to get so familiar with our own writing that we don’t always catch the problems that jump out to fresh eyes.
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing: Don’t Use Walls of Text
A golden rule of blog writing is don’t wear out your audience’s attention span. Your readers are surrounded by content which is fighting for their attention all day long, and you can guarantee they’ll be exhausted just by looking at a giant wall of text. Don’t give your readers any reason to think your content isn’t worth it. Make it more appealing to them by breaking your text up into smaller paragraphs, which are far less intimidating. Use headings, white space, and anything else to create “breaks” in between text.
Images are another great way to retain your readers’ interest and aid their attention spans. We’re attracted to visuals, so take advantage of it. You can wrap images in paragraphs for a way to make paragraphs less intimidating, and you can use screenshots or instructional images as aids. Whatever images you use, make sure they are high quality and clear. And of course, you can’t just take any images from the internet, so make sure to use images in the public domain or obtain the correct permissions. For free, high-quality images, we love sites like Unsplash and Pixabay.
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing: Don’t Ignore the Design
We just talked about how much we emphasize the visual side of things, and the same goes for your website. If your site design looks unattractive or confusing, your readers will not want to spend a lot of time there reading your blog posts. Make sure your site gives a good impression by ensuring it is organized and easy to navigate, your color scheme and images complement each other, and your fonts and formatting are readable and attractive. Another good rule of thumb is to have your blog located on your homescreen and to have social media share buttons integrated into it as well. Luckily, if you’re using a blog platform like WordPress (our blog platform of choice), you’ll have plenty of great template and design choices.
Don’ts of Business Blog Post Writing: Don’t Set Unrealistic Goals
Though it’s great to be ambitious and have big plans for your blog, be careful not to put more on your plate than you can handle. Figure out what your goals are for your blog and then work out a plan for how to get there. If you want to be able to post once a week, maybe start with one post a month, then two, then work your way up to once a week. If you want a certain number of views, start sharing and developing relationships with other bloggers, and steadily expand your reach and blogging community. Be patient. It takes time to see results, so keep at it. Don’t be afraid to experiment to see what works and what doesn’t. Mix it up and try new things. If you get excited and have fun with your blog, odds are good that your readers will too.
Whether you’re an experienced blogger or just stepping out into the blogging world, we hope these “Dos” and “Don’ts” help you out in your future writing endeavors and excite you to make your blog the best it can be. Sometimes it really is the little things–from finding an angle and promoting your posts to breaking up text and remembering to proofread–that truly make all the difference.
Did you know that designing, building, and running WordPress blogs is a big part of our work here at SocialNicole? Writing and publishing our own blog is part of our own social media marketing plan, and as a leading social media agency we know blogging inside and out! We love sharing our social media marketing knowledge and expertise with our readers and providing value to them everyday. Want to learn more of what we have to offer you and your business in the world of digital marketing? We would love to hear from you. Contact us today about partnering with your business to take your social media presence to the next level.