No One Will Read Your Blog, Unless You Do These 4 Things

Starting a business blog is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. But writing compelling, high-quality content is only half the battle. You want your audience to comment on your posts, share them and come back for more. After all, engaging your readers is the whole point, isn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen unless you do these four things.

1. You write valuable content

Your content might be beautifully written and thoroughly researched, but that doesn’t mean it’s valuable. And if your content isn’t valuable, that’s a problem. You can bet your bottom dollar it’ll get you nowhere very fast. But how do you determine what content is valuable? As a business, your job is to fill a need. Your blog, by extension, also needs to address your customer’s needs. With this in mind, determining what’s valuable becomes a matter of answering a simple question: “What does my audience need help with?” Answering this question calls for some careful thought. You need to ask yourself what matters to your target readers and what their needs are. More importantly, what do they struggle with? Once you figure this out, you’re on your way to writing content that’s valuable. It’s also much simpler and less stressful to come up with content, because your ideas will be informed by the topics your audience wants to read about and the questions they have.

2. You blog regularly

Blogging is one of those things that does more harm than good if it isn’t done well. There’s no faster way to turn your comments section into a desert wasteland than to blog sporadically or too infrequently. Blogging is all about building a relationship with your audience. As with any other relationship, it needs regular face time. You wouldn’t expect to turn an acquaintance into a close friend if you only met them twice a year would you? You similarly can’t expect reader engagement if you only blog once in awhile. Ideally, you should blog at least once a week. More important, however, is that your posts are regular and consistent. Unless you can commit to a regular posting schedule, starting a blog is actually a bad idea. Your readers need to expect and even look forward to your posts. Fall short, and many will start to lose interest and move on. Blog too erratically and they might even start to question whether you’re in business anymore.

3. You communicate with personality

Many businesses find blogs attractive because they’re a relatively cheap marketing strategy that gets results. Unfortunately, many businesses also fail to grasp the importance of getting your personality across on your blog. It’s hard to even conceive of the number of blogs that are probably out there on the Internet. And a fair number of them might be writing about your same niche or line of business. Luckily, there’s a way you can stand out, and it takes virtually no effort: you need to communicate with your own voice and get your personality across. There are way too many blogs with the same generic vanilla content out there. Not only are they boring, but they come off sounding insincere. You shouldn’t be scared to be different. Be yourself, use your voice and put your own unique twist on things. You’ll be different with less effort and you’ll come off sounding more credible and trustworthy, which is what you’re trying to achieve in the first place.

4. You link to other blogs

Adding links to other posts might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s actually a good idea. There are several sound reasons why you should link out to other posts, but that’s a whole other blog post. The point here is that you should link and link well. Of course, this isn’t license to link overkill. Don’t just do it for the sake of it. The trick is to do it correctly and in a way that makes sense. Linking back to relevant, high-quality posts will boost your post’s authority and can also drive more traffic to your website. Do you want your blog to work harder for you? Reach out to see how we can help.