“70% of people prefer to learn about a company through articles rather than adverts”

People don’t want to be sold to. As SEO guru Neil Patel says, “they hate being lied to, manipulated, pressured, and in every other respect prevented from making up their own minds in their own time. They also hate feeling like those things are happening (even if they aren’t)”.

They also want to know that the business they are buying from is passionate about what they do. That they care about their product or service and their clients as well. Blogs can help with this vital piece of social proof, as long as you get them right. Get them right and they should continue to drive traffic to your website long after you have published them.

A good business blog post should:

• Tell people something they want to know: if you want your customers to read your blog posts, you’ll need to write about something that is interesting and important to them. Think about and research the subjects around your product, industry, and competitors.

• Speak to them in a way they can understand: you might be an expert in your field and talk to other experts all day long. Maybe you talk in the language your industry uses. But does your customer? Make sure your blog posts are written for the people you want to read them.

• Be well written: you might get away with poorly-written content for a while, but it won’t get you anywhere in the long run. Your customers won’t read it and neither will the search engines.

• Be visually appealing: it’s not just the style and language that will keep a reader’s interest – it’s how it looks on the page too. Long, dense paragraphs in a small font are a lot less appealing than well-structured, neatly presented information broken up to make it easier to read. It’s even got a name (of course) – ‘chunking’ – and it makes content easier to ‘digest’.

• Include relevant media and links: if you make a claim, you’ll need to back it up somehow, and search engines look for good quality links to and from your site. Pictures, graphs, infographics, and so on all break up the text and make it more interesting and easier to read – and help with chunking.

• Include a call to action: a good business blog should include a call to action, but not be aggressively salesy. After all, people don’t like to be sold to. Maybe you want to start a conversation or get people to sign up for your updates: blog content is about the long game, it’s not a pushy sales pitch.

• Help the search engines find it: you don’t need to be an SEO expert to make sure you have the right ingredients for search engines to find your blogs. Following all the basic points above should help ensure you are well on your way.

Writing business blog posts

Writing blogs for your business shouldn’t be a chore. If it is and you don’t see that changing, maybe it’s time to outsource. 

Alternatively, you can learn all the tricks of the trade and improve your business blog-post writing so you can lose the fear, become more efficient, and write more effectively.

This blog’s call to action

If you don’t want to write your own business blogs (or never actually even get round to it), why not give me a call and find out how I can help you by doing it instead?

However, if you or one of your employees would like to learn how to create better business blog posts in a small, interactive, group-learning environment (one-hour-a week-for four weeks), followed by a 121 with me afterwards, please check out my How to Write Great Blogs for your Business course.

OK, so that was a bit salesy… But every now and then, and if it’s relevant – why not!

Find out more at: rachelbraywriting.com/