Business blogging – 10 top tips

Ten top tips for business blogging – Tip 1

Today I’m going to share one of my top tips to help you be more effective and efficient with your business blogging efforts. This comes from a workshop I did at Nicky Kriel’s Social Media Summit in Guildford.

The theme was saving time using social media so my workshop included 10 top tips to get faster and more efficient in business blogging.

I had a mixture of ‘old hands’ and new starters in my workshop so there was some wisdom coming from the audience which I will also share.

I was going to do this as one blog post but on reflection, and taking into consideration one of my top tips, I decided to break it into 10 posts.

So the first tip is … have a cunning plan!

Think ahead and come up with a good plan!

It’s tempting to just dive in and get going with a blog. However you will need to have a well thought out plan or you could end up on the scrapheap of disillusioned business bloggers and blogs.

• Your blog is part of your marketing mix so think of it as a marketing campaign. It’s not about you, it’s about what your customers, clients and visitors want and are hungry for. Give some thought to your objectives, your target audience, rules of engagement, content strategy and how you will measure success.
• Content pipeline – You need a pool of post ideas to choose from if you are going to be consistent in your business blogging. Consistency is a key ingredient that will keep your visitors engaged.
• The first step is to brainstorm topics so you have lots of blog topics to choose from.
• Then create a blogging schedule –professional bloggers know this is an important discipline. Be realistic in what you can achieve. Better to produce a blog post every month then try and do one every week and keep missing milestones. Plan 3 – 6 months in advance depending on how often you intend to publish.
• Think about the best times to publish for your target audience. Weave that into your blogging schedule. Depending on your type of business you may get better response during the week. You may want to avoid posting on a Friday before a Bank Holiday weekend unless you’re in the tourism or retail industry for instance!
• Have some blog posts in reserve and share other content like YouTube videos if you’re stuck for inspiration.

So that’s my first tip for better business blogging. I’m sure you can share some of your insights too. It seems that blog commenting has gone out of fashion.

Prove me wrong by leaving a comment below.

Why do bloggers always feel cold? Because they are surrounded by drafts!

Photo by Bram Naus on Unsplash.