Our 15 Favorite Blogging Tips

Good business blogs can boost your search engine rankings and increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It's also a great way to show people you are an expert in your field. With an hour a week you can use our favorite tips to build an effective blog for your business website!

Form function and layout

Include a lead capture form and use your blog to build a newsletter contact database. Keep it simple, just a name and email will do to increase sign up rates.
Although there are choices for hosting a business blog, the greatest SEO benefit comes from host your blog on your own business website domain in a sub-directory.
Add social media links to help people to share articles they find interesting. Do you need links to 10 different networks or will just a Facebook like and tweet button do? Keep it simple for readability.
Don't give users the ability to comment initially. Like forums on websites, comments should be enabled once a following or momentum is achieved, tumble-weed rolling through your comment sections is not a good look.
On your main blog page include introduction (or teaser) text for 4-5 articles, followed by links to more articles.
Include recent articles in the sidebar of appropriate non-blog pages.
Write blog posts regularly and consistently to encourage returning visitors. If your website is difficult to update invest in a CMS website redesign and save yourself hours of frustration!

Writing blog Articles

Aim for 300-500 words per post.
Use graphics, photos and video to spice up your blog posts and help readers quickly understand the topic.
Think about common questions from your target market (raid your FAQ pages!)
Your blog should provide information, include some links to products or services and leave the sales pitch on those pages.
A catchy blog post title is a must. Think carefully and include keywords.
Link to other previous relevant blog articles, and product or service offerings (Internal linking is a plus for SEO and navigation!)
Spell check! Get your article proofread before posting, preferably by 2-3 people. They will not only find grammar and spelling mistakes, but give valuable feedback on the article.
Promote each new article through social networks and forums.

Remember, the results won’t happen overnight, but will come with time and consistent effort. As your blog grows so will a regular audience of returning visitors, and organic traffic from search engines.

Comments

emedia studios August 3, 2011-03 01:44am

I disagree with not allowing comments on your blog, from the start you should always allow comments, you just need to moderate them and make sure that they are relevant to the post. If they are, they can contribute to the topic, which is a good thing, it also adds content to the article, Google likes this. It doesn't matter if the comments primary motive is to gain a back link to their website either, as long as the comment is relative and informative, I will publish it. If its not then I won't.

Apart from that, I agree with the rest of this post, your on the right track...Thanks for the share.

Chris August 5, 2011-05 05:45am

I agree comments are valuable in terms of growing content and interacting with readers.

I have softened on this one. With the strong growth of social media, I think you can draw on networks to gain valuable comments from the outset. Without such networks or other exposure, blogs lack the ability to draw comments.

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