Five tips on how to increase impact with your business blog!

It is an important milestone for most companies just to make the decision to start blogging and then try to get going with the content creation. The next challenge is to make sure the blog creates real impact; both for your company in terms of new leads, but also for the readers in terms of the value it provides as a great source of knowledge.

Here are five tips to consider for taking your business blogging to the next level:

1. Data driven quality check

It is a no brainer that it is crucial to publish content of high quality. Content that is perceived as useful and valuable for the personas. But what is quality? One way to find out is to track what the visitors like the most.

By categorising your posts and measure what type of content attracts the most readers and new subscribers you will get a good overview of what type of posts to focus on moving forward. Here are some examples of categories for B2B blog posts:

• Explanation: A short post that explains fundamental terms and concepts in your industry in a ‘What is’ manner.
• Tactical: A post that is around 1,000 words and written in a ‘How to’ manner.
• Strategic: A post that is minimum 1,500 words. For example a detailed guide that provides readers with detailed knowledge on a specific topic.

Here you can find more examples of how to categorise your posts. 

You can simply create an Excel-spread sheet with the categories and sort your posts according to the categories. Analyse each post to see how many views, new subscribers and leads it generated. Then summarise the result for each post within the categories—and you can then deduce what type of category/posts that makes best impact!

2. Frequency

It is key to publish posts on a regular basis. The more frequent you publish posts the higher readership and the more subscribers you will get—most likely.

Just to take one example from the Zooma blog (The Onlinification Blog), when moving from publishing two posts a week to three posts a week, the views increased by approx. 200% and the subscribers increased by almost 100%.

3. Content that last

Often a post is mostly read just after it has been published, but to maximise the number a views over time you should make sure you have many posts on subjects that last and is found useful for a long period of time. Meaning that your posts ideally shouldn’t be too news oriented and perceived as time sensitive.

Thanks to the organic search, the long lasting subjects will get found and drive traffic to your blog for months or even years.

4. How to gather the right blog post titles

One of the most important things is to have an effective and smooth process in place to be able to plan, get posts written, published and analysed. To be able to publish posts frequently you need a lot of good ideas for posts. This is how you can do it:

1. Gather all ideas for posts that pop up every day at work.
2. Store them in one place and dedicate a writer for each subject.
3. Set a time for when the draft should be ready, proof read and published. Don’t forget that everyone in a company has valuable knowledge to share—not only the marketers should write the posts!

Get more tips on how to get your business blog filled with relevant content in my previous post.

5. Distribution

You should have a distribution plan in place, otherwise the risk is that the blog content will not be spread and read. Analyse the offsite touch points (a.k.a. social media channels) you use and optimise them to get even better reach and impact.

Facebook is often perceived as the most impactful offsite touch point for B2C companies and LinkedIn for B2B. You can read more about the effectiveness of different offsite touch points for different types of companies here.

Want to learn more about business blogging?