Four (4) Goals Your Business Blog Should Accomplish
That’s right, readers – today’s blog is a blog about blogs. More specifically, a business blog about business blogs. Whoa. If that’s not meta enough for you, you should probably go watch Being John Malkovich.
After years of developing business blogs for companies and operating our own, we’ve learned a few things about what a successful blog should accomplish. Now we’re giving you the inside track.
If you’re just starting to develop your business blog, set it up to accomplish these four goals. And if you already have a business blog, pull it up right now and make sure it does these four things:
1. Provide content useful to potential customers
The purpose of having a “business” blog as opposed to a personal blog (which are generally focused on views and opinions) is to engage potential customers. You want to create an entry point to your company, making people aware of your business and your services. You can’t do that unless you are posting information that potential customers want to read. You have to ask yourself: What information would people interested in my services want to read about? Create your content accordingly.
2. Appear attractive and accessible to visitors
Once you know what kind of content you need to create (the kind customers are looking for), you need to work at making that content accessible and entertaining. That starts with your overall blog design and theme. You want all the people who stumble onto your blog to be impressed and intrigued enough to stick around and check things out. You also want headlines that grab readers. Even if a person were to just see the headline, they should want to read.
3. Include a plethora of “searchable” content
Going back to point #1, the goal of your blog is to bring potential customers in. That’s why you want the content of your blog to come up in searches. That means you should include subject keywords in your posts and optimize your headlines for searches. For example, MONSTERS Unlimited helps businesses develop websites. If a company looking to develop a website is doing some research and searches the term “how to develop a website” – there’s a good chance the post will turn up in their search results.
4. Push readers/customers to your website
As important as getting people to your blog is (driving readership is a whole other ball game), making sure people can easily access your website from your blog. In fact, you want your blog to lead people to your website. You want your posts to engage people enough that they want to know more about the authors – what do they do? Can they help me? Make it easy for people to find this information. You can include links to applicable website pages in posts, include a link in your header or navigation, or develop an About page with info and links.
When your business blog has all these elements in place, you have the best chance of accomplishing your ultimate blog goal: attracting and contracting new customers.
