How to write a business blog that draws in prospects in 8 steps

2.  Plan your blog

For diary-style hobbyist bloggers, breaking open the laptop and letting the words flow to the sound of light-jazz in your favourite coffee shop is great. However, it very rarely works for business. Before you type the first word of your blog, build a plan starting with your objective and working backward to figure out how you are going to achieve it.

Ask yourself:

• What can you write about to attract the right people?
• What do these people want to hear about when they're engaged?
• How will you influence them to do what you want them to do?
• How can you make it easy for them to move on to the next step of the process after reading, or to read more blogs if they like?

For each blog, have a specific target offering or action in mind for the reader when deciding on a blog topic and keep it in mind throughout the process. You don't have to sell that offering hard - in fact it's often best not to - just say something that gets people thinking about it positively.

From there, think about the prospects you want to talk to and how you can entertain or educate them in a way that will increase their chances of buying or completing the action you have in mind.  Then consider how you can tie it all together and lay it out. This ensures your blog will work effectively to market your business.

Do this for every blog and be sure to keep your content relevant to your offerings, your prospects and your business’s more general goals. Blogs will work best for you when they are hitting the core points and answering the core questions in your business's field for the people it serves.

To ensure this happens, it’s very beneficial to find out what your target demographic are searching for online – the keywords and key phrases – and include these in relevant blogs. We’ll talk about that more later.

Incorporating keywords into blog posts is crucial but don't let them mess up the flow. If your sentences come across as unnatural or jarring, the reader will soon abandon your website. Find a balance between SEO and the human connection - great things can happen when you combine the two.
 
– Rich Sutherland, Copywriter and Editor of Hull Is This

To really assure yourself of blogging success, make a blogging calendar like this one in advance. That way, you can lay out your topics in an organised way so there are no gaps or repetitions in your output within a short time.

As well as making your blogging efforts more effective, planning saves time in the long run by giving you something to start from when you do hit the drafting stage.

3.   Be engaging!

Try to be interesting and engaging. Every topic can be engaging to someone if it's handled correctly. While some love non-stop action and drama some love … wifi extenders. Simply entertaining isn’t the only way to engage people though. In fact, in business, it’s not even the best way.

Educational blogs that can help your target demographic are some of the most valuable you can publish. If you can give readers useful and valuable information in an original way, not only will they appreciate it, but you’ll engage them and make them consider you as a provider of real value, meaning you’ve already taken them to the next step in the marketing process. Educate marketing prospects to show that you’re a reliable and knowledgeable authority in your field, whether that’s soft drinks or computer hardware. There are just a few things to remember.

First, try not to say what everyone else is saying, and if you are – as in a blog about writing blogs for example – try and say it in a different way, by taking ironic pot-shots at yourself, for example.

Be generous with your knowledge and advice. Blogging is a great opportunity to show off your expertise; it shouldn't be used as a hard sales tool. Give tips and share industry insights; your audience will appreciate it, and your credibility will skyrocket in the process

– Zach Greaves, Director of Artus Digital Marketing

Unless you’re a professional ghost-writer, the best voice you can use is your own. Speak as you would to a close customer ot stakeholder. Relax and let the words come to you. No-one wants a blog that sounds like it was written by a robot. Personality is originality!

4.   Don’t be salesy – especially in a sales blog

People who visit your company website will know intellectually exactly what you’re there for, but they don't want it rubbed in their face. As I mentioned above, you’re not giving them free content for the sake of your health, you’re trying to make a sale. But if you’re too obvious, it will put readers and prospects right off before they have the chance to come around to your way of thinking and your product. Avoid being a sharp, jarring salesperson who will interrupt a good blog unnecessarily with news of the 'latest offer'. That’s just bad writing.

Instead, consider a relevant and seamless call to action at the end of the blog, or an in-text link to somewhere that provides more relevant information or value in the area you're covering. Keep most of your blogs reader-focused, not sales-focused though.

5.    Keep the tone and style simple

Appearing knowledgeable is one thing, but using long words and jargon for the sake of it just makes you sound pompous, confusing and off-putting. Keep it as simple as you can while still catering to your audience.

Tip: Do what newspapers do. They imagine the least literate person who might read their content (the lowest common denominator), and then have their reporters write articles so this person can read them. You may be surprised how low these are - The Sun’s is 8, while the Guardian’s and the Times’s is 14. Pick an appropriate age and, when proofreading through a blog, ask yourself if a person of that age could understand it.

The chosen ages might sound young, but the younger reading age you target, the more of your audience will be engaged by what you write. Don’t worry about sounding foolish. If you know what you’re talking about, you will sound just as clever when talking in simple terms as in complex ones, if not more so.

Ernest Hemmingway is a great example of a great writer who mastered the art of shrewd simplicity. The app that shares his name is a great way to ensure a simple and attractive style, focusing on all-important short sentences.

Useful tool: The Hemmingway App for easily readable writing.

6.    Do something different …

Standing out in business blogging requires just the same approach as standing out in business itself: You need to experiment, try new things, break old rules, rebel, think outside the box and break new ground. Existing ways of doing things are useful too, but they’re only competitive if you’re improving and disrupting them to become more effective. Blogging may feel new and challenging, but that doesn't mean you should play it too safely by the book.

‘Breaking new ground’ is a good phrase, referring to ploughing wild lands for the first time to turn them into farmland. It’s tough – or so I hear – but it’s a worthwhile way to create wealth in a place where there was none before. The same is true of creating new and different content. It’s difficult and sometimes risky, but it can be rewarding in personal and economic terms and, no matter what happens, you will stand out from the crowd.

So when writing blogs, don’t box yourself in with unnecessary rules. In fact, you should even experiment with breaking the rules that don't seem necessary and creating new rules that benefit you. That’s the way some of the most successful blogs and news feeds, including Buzzfeed got started.

7.     … but be consistent

Your audience wants something regular to read from week-to-week, or month-to-month at least. No-one is going to come back regularly to a site where hardly anything is ever published. Conversely, pumping out five blogs on a day when you have a lot of free time or are feeling particularly inspired will not get you the best exposure.

Keep the structure of the blog consistent and useable while allowing scope for creativity too. It’s important to allow readers to access and enjoy the blog easily and repeatedly in a way they are familiar with.

Blog structure is critical, not only for SEO (search engine optimisation), but also from a user experience perspective. Make sure your text is split up using appropriate headings that use 'H1', 'H2' 'H3' formatting within Word of Google Docs and copy this formatting across into the website. 
Also, ensure you use at least 2 quality, relevant external links, and one internal link to maximise SEO benefits.

 – Zach Greaves, Director of Artus Digital Marketing

Speaking of structure and SEO – including linked contributions from other experts in the field you are covering improves optimisation and adds more value for everyone involved. It also reinforces your network, opens the door for joint promotion of everyone’s offerings and adds to your external links, too. I can’t overstate how much this process can add to your blog’s success. Thanks Zach and Rich!

Once you have a regular and consistent blog up and running, you can reinforce it with a regular email to get your content into people’s inboxes and pull them back to your site.

8.    Publicise and promote after publishing

There are many ways to promote your business’s blog. Having a regular email newsletter run alongside your blog to tell regulars and prospective customers what’s in it is a particularly good one. The newsletter can feed into the blog while getting more value from the content by including tasters and overviews, together with links to the full articles.
 
On the other side of the coin, you can let blog readers know they can keep up to date with all your articles by subscribing to your newsletter. In this way the two marketing assets start to feed into eachother, giving your business more than twice as much value for one piece of content while building up a log of warm prospects who can contact you when they're ready to buy. This works especially well for businesses with offerings that are considered a lot but only purchased occasionally, like cars or mortgages.

Linking from one blog to another relevant one is another good way to keep your readers and to give them extra value.

You can further increase the reach of your blog and its value to you on social media. At the simplest level, you can tease your blogs on there with a picture, a summary or quote and a link.

Remember to tag your blogs, write a description and aim to get a few relevant target keywords for your site in there in order to climb the search engine rankings too.

This should be enough info to get your business blog converting. Remember to track the value and origin of all those lovely conversions so you know what's working for you and feel free to email us if you need more help or advice.

Good luck and happy blogging