Seven ways to make business blogging deliver results

Business blogging is now firmly wedged in the consciousness of Australia. Organisations of all sizes are increasingly heading online to share their thoughts about everything from product development to industry commentary and expert advice. While this enthusiasm is admirable, simply writing content and hoping people will come to your site isn’t enough anymore, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

To really get the most out of your brand’s blog, it’s essential to have a degree of technical know-how, or you’ll end up wasting a huge amount of time, effort and money. This is an issue we’re going to be discussing a lot at Social Media Week Sydney in September, and here’s our guide to maximising the potential of your brand blog.

1. Think carefully about how you build your blog

There’s a multitude of platforms available to build a blog in, and each web developer will have their preference. Getting this right is important. From a search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective WordPress is the best option. It’s extremely cost-effective, and having run blogs across many platforms, WordPress just seems to perform better and is extremely easy to use.

2. Think about Plug-ins

One of WordPress’ great advantages is that its software is open source. That means there’s huge amount of free plug-ins available that can enhance the performance of your blog and tailor it to your requirements. All these can be searched for and uploaded via the WordPress ‘plugins’ tab on the left of the back-end dashboard. Essentials include Yoast, a simple-to-use SEO tool to maximise the visibility of your posts, and Google XML Sitemaps, a tool that generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines better index your blog. Both these tools result in a more visible blog, which can only be a good thing.

3. Properly research your content

As dumb as it sounds, planning and researching what content you write about is an essential part of running a successful blog. Q&A app, Quora is a good starting point, allowing you to track the most popular questions around a particular topic. Once you know what people are asking, then you can answer it in your blog post. And if you’re one of the lucky people to be on Facebook Graph Search, you can see what your brand community is into. Just go to Graph Search and type: Pages liked by people who like ________ (inserting your page name). This will give you a list of pages your fans like and follow, which you can then use as a basis to keep on top of the topics and issues your fans care about – and craft your content around this.

4. Properly optimise your content for search

Once you’ve decided what you’re going to write about, then make sure your blog post is properly optimised. We’ve already mentioned Yoast, but you also need to tag each post with the relevant key words, and come up with a killer headline. This should both draw people in (think BuzzFeed), but also be optimised for search. A quick and easy way to do this is through Soovle – simply start typing your proposed headline and see what people are searching for around this. Also get your head around Google’s keyword planner, which allows you to identify the most popular key words used around a particular topic. Once you’ve found them, make sure you include them in your headline and first paragraph.

5. Embrace ‘hub and spoke’

One of the key ways to create an audience for your blog is by channelling readers from your existing social media channels. This approach is known as ‘hub and spoke’ where each time you make a blog post, you also post about it on your social media channels. If you’ve not got any social media channels, then get some, quick! Start with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, and you’ve got the lion’s share of audience.

6. Get your head around metrics

Whatever blog platform you use, you should have Google Analytics set up for it, as well as on your company website. Your in-house tech expert will know how to do this. Key metrics in analytics include bounce rate – this is the percentage of people visiting your blog then ‘bouncing’ straight off it. A lower bounce rate indicates a more engaged readership. Analytics also gives you an idea of what blog content is most appealing, allowing you to refine it accordingly. The emphasis should always be on using the data to constantly refine your creative approach when it comes to blogging.

7. Think about what success looks like

Finally, think honestly about what success looks like. Forget about your blog driving sales (for now). That’s a long way off. Is it about building an engaged, loyal readership? Is it about driving traffic to your website? Or is it about establishing a thought-leadership position for your company? Whatever it is, stay focused on achieving it, and set challenging but not impossible metrics.

This post was written by Will Ockenden, a UK and Sydney-based social media consultant, and executive member of Social Media Week Sydney.