How to Write a Better Business Blog

Every corporation today should be creating and maintaining a fresh and engaging blog – and they should be monitoring it, too. Creating your own content is important, but so is monitoring—and responding to—the conversations taking place about your brand on blogs and forums across the Web.

The biggest risk with blogs is a lack of relevant and timely publishing. If you don’t post timely, punchy, informative posts, your blog will not be read or be found by search engines. Your goal is not to obtain momentary awareness but to maintain relevancy over the long term for your target audience. You need to use buzz-monitoring tools to find out what customers are talking about—what interests them right now—and then use your blog to write about these subjects. This quest for prolonged relevancy and a deeper interaction with your customer is what a good business blog is all about.

It is no secret that trusted information sources, offline and online, are given greater credence by decision-makers than paid advertisements. People may be talking about your brand, your clients’ brands and your competitors as well. Are you listening and responding— and thereby demonstrating your commitment to the community that surrounds your business on the Web? Are you using monitoring tools to find and monitor all the blogs where people are talking about your brand, so you can engage in the conversation, post responses, and build relationships with them? Your own blog-publishing efforts and a blog-monitoring and commenting program must offer unique opportunities for a richer connection with key influencers.

Interacting with only the people who fully support your brand isn’t going to win any hearts and minds—nor make a lasting impact on branding and revenue. Use social media monitoring tools to find out who is talking about your brand, what they are saying, and what they like and dislike about your product. Understanding the key positive and negative voices discussing your brand will enable you to even better engage your fans, as well as to reach out to detractors to try to win them over. If you take a blogger’s criticism or suggestion and use it in creating a better product or service, not only will you have won that user over, you will have shown that you are taking your customers’ opinions to heart. Treat all of your blog-based interactions like a true relationship, with both sides giving and taking. You might gain valuable product, marketing, and segment knowledge from the interactions. Offer your key influencers special promotions or give them a say in product design or development. Remember, online interactions are a two-way street.

Use social media monitoring tools to find out which blogs and forums are hosting conversations about your brand. Take the time to know where your brand is being discussed and research the groups that are talking about it. Doing so gives you a better chance of relating to users and creating a relationship, rather than just talking at them in your own blog and when responding to their posts.

Take a close look at your business blog. Is it boring? Are the posts too infrequent? Does it speak to the conversations you’ve uncovered with social-media monitoring tools? Does it invite engagement by making it easy to post responses and to share posts via email and social networks? The person responsible for writing content for your blog should have full access to the social media monitoring data you uncover on a daily or weekly basis—so they can write posts that touch on those subjects. In addition, your social media marketing team should work hand-in-hand with your business blogger to promote posts with all the social-networking platforms, as well as to reach out to external bloggers to invite them to read and comment on your blog.

Many blogging programs fail to be relevant and drive engagement because businesses bite off more than they can chew and then the blogging programs languishes due to lack of time. Start small and then grow the program from there. It doesn’t cost a lot to (a) write posts for your blog; (b) use free or inexpensive monitoring tools to stay abreast of conversations about your brand; and (c) participate in the Web-wide dialogue taking place about your brand. But it does take a lot time. Make sure to map out your objectives based on the available bandwidth of your marketing team.

The pitfalls are many: failing to post regularly on your corporate blog; posting only text and no photos, videos, or links; failing to create a cohesive voice on your corporate blog by allowing several people to post; and neglecting to use all the methods possible to drive traffic to your blog (SEO, SEM, social media networks, email campaigns, etc.). But it’s easy to avoid these pitfalls now that you know what they are. Following these simple rules will result in a blogging program that does what you want it to: drive customer engagement, build your brand and boost sales.