The document provides 5 tips for successful business blogging: 1) agree on the purpose and strategy for the blog, 2) determine an appropriate content strategy, 3) optimize blog content, 4) encourage interaction through comments, and 5) promote blog posts and make them shareable on social media. Following these tips can help businesses generate more website traffic, social media followers, and leads through an effective company blog.

1. 5 tips for successful
business blogging
How to get the most out of your company
blog
Prepared by Matt Gill

2. Context points for this guide
1. Blogging is a powerful tool. Business that blog generate 55%
more website visitors, 102% more Twitter followers and 126%
higher lead growth than non blogging businesses*
2. Given the importance of blogging in contributing to the success
and growth of businesses, it is crucial that you execute the right
strategy for your company blog
3. This means creating the type of content that will attract your
target consumer and turn site visits into leads or sales
4. To do this you will need to create informative, relevant and
compelling content that your audience will want to both read and
share
The following pages of this guide detail our top 5 considerations for
helping you to develop a successful blogging strategy for your
business.
* Source: http.blog.hubspot.com 2

3. 1. Agree on the overarching purpose
and strategy for your blog
There are 2 key questions that need to be answered:
1. What should the blog say about your company and
what it stands for?
2. Who are you targeting as a business?
The answers to these questions will be informed by a
broader vision and strategy for your company but are
crucial in defining the role that your company blog can
play in contributing to the success and growth of your
business.
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4. 2. Determine your content strategy
The next step is to then determine what types of content that is
relevant to your business will appeal to this audience. What will
they find interesting and useful?
Products and services should be integrated into blog posts in a
subtle way, as long as they are a useful and relevant addition to
the content. Explicit promotion can come across as shallow and
is also unlikely to be interesting enough to hold an audience’s
attention or for them to want to share it.
It is important to determine the frequency of blog posts - the
general rule is the more often the better, but this must be
balanced with the reality of running a business and it is
important not to set unrealistic targets. The key thing is that
each blog post is informative and interesting (this is the golden
rule) - better to have 2 compelling posts a week than 5 dry
ones.
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5. 3. Optimise your blog content
Identify which key terms and phrases your target
audience will be searching for and incorporate those
phrases in both the content and title for your blog posts.
It’s also important to create eye catching or pithy titles
for your blog posts (lists work particularly well).
Create individual pages for each blog post so that search
engines have more pages to index on your site - this will
help with your natural search rankings.
You should also link internally between pages on your site
via key word ‘anchor text’ (text that is clickable) - e.g.
linking from a blog post to a specific product page that is
relevant to the content of the post.
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6. 4. Encourage interaction
Allowing your audience to comment on your blog posts
will encourage interaction and open dialogue - it also
generates more fresh content for your site (search
engines favour fresh content).
Overly negative, malicious and ‘spammy’ comments
should be moderated but otherwise it is good practice to
be as open as possible - feedback via comments will also
allow you to determine which posts are interesting or
useful for your audience and can inform future content
strategy.
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7. 5. Promote your blog posts and make
them shareable
You should add social share buttons to your blog posts so
that site visitors can share them within their social
footprint - e.g. facebook, Twitter, G+, StumbledUpon,
Digg, delicious, Pinterest. This will help to extend the
audience for your posts and create more inbound links to
your site which will drive site traffic and have a positive
impact on your natural search rankings.
It is also important that you push your blog posts via your
own social media channels in order to generate as much
site traffic as possible. Again, this will have a positive
impact on the rank of your content within search engine
results pages.
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8. Final Thought
Stick with it.
Business blogging can be a ‘slow burn’ endeavour
but will reap benefits in the longer term by attracting
more visitors to your site and more subsequent
conversions to lead or sale.
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9. About the author
Matt Gill is a Communications Consultant and Managing Partner of ID
Comms
Matt has spent the last 12 years driving media innovation for some
stellar global brands from adidas, HP, Jim Beam and British Airways.
Matt has been a consistent follower of the technological revolution in
media and clients value him for his intuitive understanding of how to
apply communications innovations to their business. Matt consults
for clients wanting qualified, independent advice on how to invest in
media technologies. His straightforward measured advice helps
clients discern which opportunities they might invest in now, when to
‘wait-and-see’ and which are likely just fads to be avoided. Matt
introduced British Airways to mobile applications in 2005 when this
was still a breakthrough technology and championed adidas to
deliver their first ever digital-centric World Cup campaign in 2010.
Prior to joining ID Comms, Matt worked for media agency Carat
where he was responsible for leading media innovation on the adidas
business globally. During this time he delivered the much-celebrated
adidas campaigns ‘Impossible Is Nothing’ and Originals ‘House Party’.
Matt has picked up numerous industry awards for media creativity
and innovation.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mattjwgill
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10. Right and licenses
Thank you for reading, please share freely.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a
copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
© Matt Gill, 2012
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