Make Your Blog Better

Does your business has an existing, on-site blog? If so, great! Blogs, when created, written, and posted effectively, contain great worth and value in the area of online marketing. The ideas published can drive your online marketing efforts on other social networking sites, and the content can serve as valid marketing material in and of itself. Great blogs provide an extremely high return on investment for businesses, both large and small.

Is your business’ blog accomplishing the goals you have for it? If your blog just exists, but lacks focused, directed goals, I would suggest creating and defining goals. I would suggest the following goals:

• Support SEO Efforts. Your blog’s main goal should be to drive traffic to your site. It needs to exist and publish content in order to attract Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
• Provide Helpful and Intelligent Content. Your blog should exist to provide helpful, well-written, original content regarding your products and services (and industry) to readers. Yes, there are people who will peruse the content on your site. The blog should contain information that is actually useful and interesting and related to your business/industry.
• Reinforce Your Brand to Existing Clients. Your blog exists as a way to remind your existing customers who you are, your values, and your mission. They have already purchased from you, and if you give them reasons, they will likely continue their relationship with you.
• Attract New Clients. Attracting new clients involves setting yourself apart as an expert in your industry. Providing regularly-updated, useful content on an on-site blog will certainly help in this endeavor.

Now that you have clearly defined your goals for your blog, you can make an existing blog even better by doing the following things:

• Your business’ blog should contain a professionally designed, unique layout that is coded to reflect your existing site. If this is not the case (yet), we can help you. Give us a call.
• Publish great content. Your blog should contain original, interesting, and well-written content. If writing is not your forte, delegate. Writing great posts with applicable search terms will attract readers and search engines alike.
• Make your content easily shareable by including buttons to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.
• Encourage user-generated comments. Make sure your blogs contain questions, stories, and suggestions. Challenge your readers to provide feedback, and then respond to ALL of the comments you receive.
• Include an image in every post. Make sure that your images are small and can load very quickly. Larger images often appear strange, particularly when your posts are not formatted correctly.

Happy blogging!