Starting a business blog - Steps to success

Starting a business blog is one of the best marketing activities you can invest your time in. Not only does it help to establish you as a thought leader in your space it is also a fantastic way to generate leads for your business.

The majority of the business blog tips below are around how to create engaging content for your readers. Good luck!

Business blog essentials:

Prompt communication: Answering questions from viewers is vital. Your blog is a form of Social Media. Potential customers will often bring up a list of common concerns, answering them in a witty, creative way (without using industry jargon) is creating some great business blog content.
Industry Information summary: Putting together the industry statistics, news, images and videos creates a powerful blog post. Better yet if all those are put into a single post to facilitate an easy access for the readers. This is valuing their time by saving their efforts to gather info from ten different sites. Content aggregation is incomplete (and illegal) without linking to the source info and giving it the credit it deserves.
Text is important but also boring: Graphics, sounds, video and animation add the oomph to a webpage. Text must accompany audio-visual content unless it is a dire necessity writing out lengthy stuff; even in that case, keep the sentences short, crisp and the matter to the point.
Involving guest authors: Also know as Guest Blogging. It’s kind of outsourcing; There are industry-experts that love to write about their niche in return for some backlinks. Try contacting a few experts and see if they are willing to create some content for you.
Create Lists: It is the same thing as the how-to-s or best-of-s and is a catalyst that initiates observations and fresh findings from newer angles and viewpoints.
Create charts or graphs: Nothing impresses people as much as a quick, comprehensible read and that’s what we call data. Data is telling everything in short and is a quick way to make important business decisions. Unless data is confidential, put it up to provide readers with valuable industry insights.
The OpEd approach: An OpEd is an article expressing personal opinions where writers argue about just one side of an issue. Since every industry comes with some amount of controversy, it is easy creating hot-button write-ups. This is simply polarizing a blog post and controversies never fail to attract people.
Surveys: Creating a survey on a timely topic can help you generate great stories. You could go even further and hire a PR agency to push these results to get you even more exposure in the media which will eventually funnel online leads back to your website.
Reviewing industry books: This is commenting on the comments of others on an industry. Works well with readers.
Breaking News: Act as a reporter and look for recent announcements that may impact (or has impacted) an industry. This will be helping improve on an organic search traffic and we all know how much the search engines value those sites with fresh news on a particular subject.