Do a little digging, and you’ll encounter some amazing blogs that never get the press they deserve. The blogosphere isn’t a pure meritocracy, and the most engaging bloggers aren’t always the most widely read. That goes for business-oriented and B2B blogs too, many of which are tremendously useful resources and interesting morning-coffee reads. You’ve got the great content; how do you get it out to a wider audience and build your blog’s reputation in your industry?
Blog with Authority
Where are your areas of expertise? That knowledge has tremendous value to your blog’s readers, and when you and your content creation team blog about it, you encourage visitors to share that knowledge with new readers. Get specific, too; the more details you offer, the more authority your words have. Think about how much more interested you’d be in a piece titled “5 Things You Can Do Today to Close Data Security Loopholes” than you would be in one about the importance of data security. You already know it’s important to protect your clients’ data, but only one of those blog posts gives you specific, actionable tips to accomplish your goal of improving security.
Participate
Blogs are typically classed outside of social media, but they have a strong social component too. If you open comments, take the time to respond to thought-provoking feedback your readers leave. If you keep comments closed – and that’s a perfectly valid choice, especially for B2B industries – take your participation to social media channels and welcome feedback there. If you get email from readers about a post, answer it; if your content writer inspired someone to write, harness that energy and respond in kind.
Be a Guest (or a Host)
You can also participate by posting guest blog posts featuring your company’s name on related blogs. Google recently closed a loophole that assigned undue weight to low-value guest blogs that were little more than recycled material packed around ads and back-links, but that doesn’t take away from the value of legitimate guest-blogging opportunities. Approach suppliers and closely aligned businesses with a mutual exchange of guest blog posts so you both benefit from additional exposure.
Focus on Quality over Quantity
You don’t have to read far back in this blog to see recommendations for frequent blogging, but there is such a thing as too much blogging. When you feel pressed to post multiple times a day, you risk lowering the overall quality of your blog. You want your audience to know that a new blog post from you means new, useful content and not just an ad or two-line post. Save the frequent, brief updates for your Twitter feed or Facebook page and reserve your blog for more substantial content.
Use the Right Domain Name
Your blog is an integral part of your site, not a separate entity or an afterthought. Put it in a sub-folder of your main site instead of relegating it to its own separate root domain or sub-domain. In other words, your blog should be reachable by typing your URL with the /blog suffix. If you type in BusinessContent.com/blog, you’ll see this blog because it’s in a sub-folder of the main site where it can pay off in better SEO for the whole site. There are reasons to separate your blog under its own domain – promoting the blog itself as a brand, for example, or if you plan to monetize it heavily – but in general, you’re better off keeping everything under the same umbrella.
