Business blogging success tips

There are an estimated 600 billion blogs on the internet. Most won’t compete with yours - blogs for dog breeder, salsa dancing, or cybersecurity penetration testing - but some will.

Here are ten tips on what you can do to come out on top.

1: Relevant topics

What your clients care about is more important than what you care about!

• What do people always ask about your business?
• When you meet people socially, what do they ask about your work?
• What questions do your sales and customer service staff get the whole time?
• What’s happening in your industry? (And what does it mean for customers?)
• Tell stories about your customers. (Ask the customers you feature!)

2: Good writing

Bad writing can hide good ideas.

• Keep it simple. Write for a grade 9 readability level or lower.
• Use white space, bullet points and headings.
• Tell stories and give examples to illustrate your points.
• Make those stories and examples original.
• Have an opinion. Some people will disagree, but you’ll be a lot more interesting
• Use humour.
• Start with a strong headline and first line.

3: Smart keyword selection

Choose a keyword which is right for your site as well as for the specific post.

An example to explain this: 'financial advisor sydney' is a keyword many businesses want to rank for.

• An established business has a website with multiple service pages, active social media and 50 glowing Google reviews. They might rank highly.
• A brand new company launching its first website? No chance. They'd do better to aim for something like 'financial advisor northmead' instead. Lower search volume, but if 30 people see you, it's better than 300 people not seeing you.

It’s the difference between playing for the Matildas or getting a spot in your local soccer team.

4: Don’t overdo the SEO

SEO is a bit of an arms race. SEO companies try to reverse-engineer Google's algorithm, then game the system so they show up - even if they're not actually the best page on the web for that topic.

Looking too perfect can be a cause for suspicion – it may actually harm your page’s and your site’s ranking!

5: Images

Google likes text. Humans like pictures. Be kind to the humans who visit your page and give them some pictures they’ll enjoy looking at. Rule of thumb – one image every 250-300 words.

In a dream world each image would be individually created and chosen for your blog and your brand. We don’t live in a dream world, but if you have authentic, original images – use them!

When you use stock images, use them imaginatively. (Some ideas on using stock images here.)

6: Image optimisation

Your images are for the people who visit your site, but it helps if Google can understand what they’re about.

Google doesn’t ‘see’ images the way we do. For example, you see this, which (somewhat) explains itself as people warming up for their salsa class.

Google sees this:

Nothing in that code tells Google what’s visible in this image. Missed opportunity! Optimising the file name and adding some alt text describing the image would help Google so much.

Make sure your images load fast too! Resize them and compress them.

7: Calls to action

Visitors who explore your site then wander off into the wide blue internet don't pay bills. For every blog post (or page on your site), decide what you want the visitor to do next. Then ask them to do it.

From a blog, you may want them to contact you, or visit a sales page. You may have a helpful resource which they can download.

Or you might just want them to read another post on a related topic, or a case study.

Always include at least one call to action.

Preferably more than one, so that as they scroll down, there’s always one visible.

8: Consistency

Consistency and quality are more important than frequency.

Even one post per month will make a difference over time, if you follow all the other blogging success tips in this article.

9: Promotion

Promote your blog posts.

Even your most dedicated fans are unlikely to check your website every day looking for new articles. The others need to find your one-in-600-million blog themselves. Help them!

• Invite people to subscribe so you can share future posts.
• Promote every post on social media when it’s published.
• Send updates to your newsletter list.
• Reach out to others who might be prepared to share your post or link to it.

Dont just forget about your posts once you’ve published them, either. An article about how to prevent puppies getting ticks is going to be helpful every year at the start of tick season. So promote it every year. Other posts may be relevant to what’s happening in the news. Comment again and share again.

10: Clean up your old posts

Update and refresh your old content.

Posts may be still relevant but outdated. Update them.

Sometimes, popular posts fade away with age because other businesses have created newer, maybe better, posts on the same topic.

Keep an eye on what’s happening so you can decide what to do with each post.

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Which ones of these are you doing?

Which ones could you implement?

Whether your blogging is done in-house or outsourced, there's probably room for improvement.