5 Key Tips for Business Blog Writing

Creating your own blog is a great way to interact with potential clients and draw in leads. As you build trust with your audience, a blog can help to position you as an expert within your field. Building awareness, providing education, and showcasing your knowledge can all be great assets for your business. As you start your own blog, keep the following five tips in mind.

A business blog is part content marketing, part social media marketing, and part search engine optimization. A successful blog requires writing strategies that set the format apart from traditional social media sites. Consider these five tips when writing for your blog.

1. Experiment to Find Your Word Count Sweet Spot

What’s the ideal length of a blog post? The answer is that it depends. In your industry, consider your reader demographics and content topics. Research other blogs in your market space. Does your target audience prefer smaller chunks of information, or would they rather sit down and read longer in-depth posts?

As a general rule, blog posts should be at least 400-500 words in order to be effective for search engine optimization. While there is no consensus of the maximum length, keeping your post to a limit of about 1,000 words is a safe bet.

2. Use Relevant Keywords Wisely

Unlike other social media posts, blogs have the potential to be powerful tools in search engine optimization—particularly if your blog is hosted on your website. To gain the most benefit, use keywords and phrases in your posts that searchers might use to find you. For example, if you’re a technology consultant based in Miami who specializes in enterprise networking, writing posts that allow you to use those keywords can help bump up your blog in search engine rankings.

3. Write Content that Provides Value

One goal of your blog is to promote your consultancy. Another is to begin to create connection and relationship with readers. Simply talking about yourself with overtly self-promotional posts is a surefire way to keep readers from coming back.

Focus on writing blog posts that are relevant to your consultancy and industry, and offer readers something of value to them. This can take the form of “how-to” posts, blogs about the latest news and developments in your industry, or tips and tricks related to your field.

4. Get Creative with Visuals

Have you ever come across a blog post or article that looks like one long page of words? Content that is not properly divided or spaced can deter people from taking the time to read it.

Make use of bulleted and numbered lists, and format your posts with headers and sub-headers. Back up what you say by linking to relevant research or related posts you’ve written. Including images, video, or infographics where appropriate can also help keep readers engaged. Depending on your audience and content styles, you can even use GIFs or memes as images in your posts.

5. End with a Call to Action

At the end of each post, include a call to action (CTA) that relates to the post and that indicates the next step for your reader. Including a CTA can help to generate leads and gather information about your target audience.It could be an invitation to subscribe to a weekly newsletter you write, a link to a related blog post, or a way download your e-book. It could also encourage the reader to get in touch with you for a free consultation.