Blogging for business checklist

Written on the 17 November 2020

Blogs within a business website, when done right, are getting great results by increasing traffic to their websites, conversion rates, Google rankings, plus much more. As there are a lot of tips surrounding the whole blogging phenomenon, Bloomtools has pulled out the key ones that are proven to work for clients in order to give you a checklist to help you get these results.

You can also watch this on a Bloomtools webinar on "How to get Results for Businesses Using Blogs"

It may seem like a long list, but once you're familiar with blogging, you'll realise it doesn't take a lot of your precious time.

Many of the essentials are inbuilt into your Bloomtools Blog tool for you already.

Purpose

• What is the purpose of your blog for your business? (eg. Increase traffic to your website,  Create a point of difference above your competitors, be seen as an expert, promote your clients, be a resource for your clients, create content for other mediums, facilitate WOM "sharing" online, promote your events)
• Define who your audience is:
  • Who is your target market
  • What is of interest to them
  • What do they search for
  • Where do you find them
  • What other areas interest them

Top Tips

• Make your blog look attractive and encourage users to read it with the use of images, headings, short paragraphs, etc
• Use descriptive, direct headings to attract your target audience, facilitate sharing, and encourage users to read your blog
• Proofread - check your spelling and grammar. Get someone else to read it before you go live. Your website content is like your business's shop window - it is a direct reflection of your business.
• Show your business's personality
• Be the expert
• Treat your blog like a product or service within your business. The Blog tool will only do so much. In order to get the great results you can achieve from blogs, you need to take it seriously and commit to at least two hours a week to write a blog - making sure you promote each blog and encourage others to share it.
• Post consistently - the rule of thumb is at least every fortnight, although weekly is better and twice a week is the ultimate in effectiveness
• Make it easy to share your blog by listing share options at the base of each blog entry - Bloomtools Blog tool provides you with the most popular Social Media share buttons, as well as Facebook commenting
• Don't have your blog separate to your own website. The benefits of blogs to your website are so big that it is important you have the blog running on the same platform as your website.

Content

• What to write about: Brainstorm with yourself and your team a list of things you can blog about, then look at your initial purpose and target market analysis to then cull what wouldn't be of interest to them and decipher which content matches your objectives.
• Produce this as a list: Identify your frequency, you may also identify a pattern of your blog entries, eg. 2 client profiles each month, 1 major tip and any industry news stories you think would be of interest to your client base.
• Some content, topic ideas to get you started are:
  • Industry news
  • Turn tips into blogs bullet what you know, then expand on that
  • Events
  • Client stories
  • New product releases
  • Awards
  • Team activities/things that just happen 
  • Other topics of interest to your target market
  • Charities you support
  • Blog about the big guys
  • Rewrite other articles, blogs of interest

Optimising your Blogs;

• Know your businesses keywords/phrases that you are optimising for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Include them where possible in your:
  • Headings
  • Links to other areas of your website (using your keywords/ phrases as the links)
  • Image names
  • Blog title
  • BUT note: Do not over-stuff it with you keywords in all locations (Google will determine whether or not you are writing your blog simply for the purpose of SEO or if you're writing it as a knowledge base resource for the marketplace.  Google is very big on content on a website or anywhere, is to be for the purpose of the end user and not to assist a business with their SEO and ranking, and are always changing their algorithm to ensure this is the case)
  • Also note, it is important your headings are of interest to your target market, so by making them all keyword-rich will turn people away.
  • Post your blog on high pageranked websites (this increases the inbound links to your website and will help your pageranking if they are ranked high). NB: if you are placing your blog on multiple locations, you will need to change your headings for each (again for the purpose of Google's perspective)
  • Place your blog onto key social media websites.
• If putting in a link to an external website, make sure you create it to open in a new window (with the Bloomtools tool, when adding the URL to link to, in the same pop-up box change the Target to being in a New Window)

Promote it. 

To promote your blog is extremely important, as it will help your pagerankings, draw other people to you (traffic), encourage viral sharing and increase your profile in the market.

Place blog  teasers on:

• Your home page (as an automated feed to go into the content area on your home page) or get it set up as part of your website design (so it is seen by anyone who goes through your website - again this automatically feeds the content as you add a new blog). A great advantage of blogs is creating a point of difference for your business, as well as keeping people on your website, etc, but if they can only find your blog by going through your website - they may never see it. Therefore, it is important you make it stand out.
• Facebook - feed it into your business's Facebook presence
• Twitter - feed it into your business's Twitter presence
• LinkedIn - manually place a teaser with a link to your blog
• Google+ - manually place a teaser with a link to your blog
• Email Signatures - take advantage of your emails that are already going out, add a teaser with a link to your latest blog
• Email people you know - only the ones that it could be of interest to
• Get clients, staff, alliances, friends to comment and share it around - unfortunately to get the sharing thing happening you need to encourage people to take action. To learn how the Bloomtools Facebook commenting works (if you have a Facebook presence), write a comment on one of our blogs then see how it appears on your Facebook page and how it is shown.
• Add to your newsletter/news update. A recent trend, which also saves time, is to use the content from your blogs in your regular email news alerts to your clients - so it is serving multiple benefits/mediums. (Hey, Google does it!)  see our Bloomnews for an example
• Submit to other blogs, websites - see note above about changing some words
• Add it to industry and alliances newsletters and websites

Tip: create your own checklist of what you need to do each time you create a blog.

Measure the results it gives you over time to enable you to see what is working and how (Bloomtools recommends you use Google Analytics - and if you have a Bloomtools website it is very simple to set up.)

Bloomtools hopes the above helps you get the most out of your Blog on your businesses website, overall don't be afraid of blogging, follow this checklist and you will do well. If you want some further assistance, please talk to your Bloomtools consultant.