One marketing tool that’s quite popular now and is becoming a staple if you want to compete in your industry, is to have a business blog. These are typically valuable and informative resources for customers and potential clients to reference and are a way for people to get to know your company better. It’s also an opportunity for you to show off your expertise and make a name for yourself.

This isn’t a project that’s temporary or that you can slap together and expect great results from overnight. There are several requirements you need to meet if your goal is to have a successful business blog. One of these being that you have to be constantly attending to it and making sure what you’re publishing is important and timely.

A Leader in Charge

Your blog won’t last long without assigning a point person in charge. It’s not good practice to launch a blog and have it sit there for an extended period of time without anyone attending to it. This is why you need to put someone on the marketing team in charge of managing it and keeping it running strong. There are several tasks they’ll need to attend to like answering comments, making required platform updates and putting together a content calendar. Assigning a team member to monitor the blog is going to be a lot more useful than many different people having their hands in it, or even worse no one at all.

Attractive Design

You should care about what your business blog looks like if you want it to be successful. The design is important to drawing in readers and keeping their attention. You want your blog to look clean, be organized and use a design that makes it easy to read. It’s best to use professional guidance in this area than it is for you to try to guess what design will be best for your company. Even if you use a service or someone on your team to design your blog, come to the table with ideas and do your homework prior to the meetings, so you know what else is out there.

Updated Technology & Security

Don’t try to launch your blog using old and outdated technology or it’ll be very difficult to manage and clunky for users. Make sure you have the right technology solutions in place before you try to launch a business blog if you want to do well with it. Also, you should hire a company like The Driz Group for all your cybersecurity needs and to keep hackers away and your site safe from wrongdoers. Prevent data breaches from happening by being proactive and protecting your company online.

Striking Images

Keep in mind how important visuals are to someone scrolling through a bunch of information online. Many companies forget about the importance of images in what they’re trying to achieve with their blog. While customers are coming to read information, they also crave beautiful images and photos that give their brain some excitement besides just reading words on a page. Refer to online resources or take your own images and create a library to use for when you’re posting new blogs to your site. Use images to tell a story and get your point across more clearly. Plus you shouldn’t simply settle on a header image, but use photos throughout your blog post to create more engaging pieces people want to read.

Social Media Presence

If you’re not already, then make sure your company is on social media and opens accounts for the platforms you believe your customers are spending time on. Social media is a great opportunity for you to share your blog posts and images and attract potential and current customers back to your website. Also, make sure you have sharing buttons included in your blog post content and images so users can distribute what they enjoy reading or seeing to their networks. Your blog is going to be a lot more successful when you’re utilizing social media to share your posts and build an even stronger following.

Consistent & Quality Content

The most important part of your blog is the content and what information you’re distributing. This is why it’s so important to consistently post quality articles your users can relate to. Sit down and come up with a focus and main topic you’re going to build your posts around. Plan out your content and topics well in advance on a calendar so you know exactly what’s being posted when and there aren’t any surprises. This way you can plan out the details and have a strategy for why you’re sharing content when you are. It’s good practice to post daily if you have the capacity, otherwise try to come up with a schedule that has you sharing a few times a week.

Metrics & Monitoring Progress

You’re not going to know how well your blog is doing or if it’s meeting your expectations unless you set goals and track progress. Decide if you care about gaining subscribers, social shares, bringing in traffic or all the above. Come up with metrics you’re going to be watching and updating on a regular basis. Meet with your team and discuss the results and adjust what’s not working. Use these check-in meetings to also brainstorm new ideas for the blog as a group and build on the successes you’re currently experiencing. You need to be able to make a case for your blog that it’s worth your team’s time and energy to keep managing it.

Conclusion

Launching a business blog is an exciting time for your company and an accomplishment to be proud of. What you don’t want to do is publish it live to your audience and then get busy and forget all about it. You need a plan in place for keeping it updated and attracting new readers on a consistent basis. Be sure to track your progress and don’t be afraid to make changes if what you’re doing isn’t getting you the results you desire.