Business Blogging 101: 5 Essential Factors for a Successful and Profitable Blog

Business blogging is an excellent way to set your company apart from competitors. Potential customers can learn about your company, investigate your product offerings, and get a better understanding of your business’ attitude toward customer service. However, blogging and developing a successful business blog are two completely different things. You need to have a defined blogging strategy if you want your posts to be successful.

If you’re a business owner considering business blogging this year, here are five critical components of a sound blogging strategy.

Mission Statement

Before you type one word, develop objectives for your blog. Without having a clear understanding of your blogging goals, you won’t know if you are moving in the right direction. You don’t want to start a business blog just because your SEO expert tells you to. Define precisely what you want to accomplish by blogging and stick to your goals.

Reader Persona Development

Just as sales departments develop buyer personas, so too should you develop reader personas for your blog. Who is your ideal reader? Why would they read your company’s blog posts? When you have a specific reader in mind, you will find it much easier to write compelling content.

Monetization Strategy

Decide in advance whether you plan to monetize your blog. Will you offer your company’s products in the sidebar of your blog? Will you use Google AdSense advertisements? Even offering CTAs in your sidebar to promote upcoming events at your business is a form of monetization. When you create a monetization strategy for your business blog, it helps you understand the importance of offering quality content and clarifies whether you’re on the right track with your mission statement.

Engagement Analysis

Engagement analysis is critical when blogging for business. You need to measure your results to understand if your content is resonating with your target customers. Track everything from site visits to social media shares and pay attention to growth rates over time.

Promotion Strategy

Speaking of social media shares, developing a promotion strategy is a vital component of business blogging. You can’t create content and hope readers will find your blog via search engine queries. Smart business bloggers use everything from social media outreach to comment marketing to increase the eyeballs on their blog.

Business blogging is an excellent way to develop your brand voice and improve your SEO at the same time. The more strategic you are in your approach, the better your results are likely to be.