4 Business Blogging Best Practices

HubSpot posted an article today (May 12th) that focuses on the 4 best practices for business blogging. Great business blogs have to walk a fine line: they have to create value for current and prospective customers while at the same time, supporting a strategy that provides business growth.

Since Business blogging has various goals, it also has some distinct best practices that distinguish it from individual and media blogs. However, I do believe that some of the key principles of media and personal blogs are still very important in business blogging. The challenge is to find the right "mix" of content for your audience.

Best Practice #1
Think like a vertically integrated publisher: Create relevant content, determine the best methods to publicize the content, and define advertising opportunities as well as manage them.
I think it is important to do all of these things (from a marketing standpoint) because it will ensure that the content created is valuable and delivered in a way that can support/benefit your company.

Best Practice #2
Focus on Non-Branded Keyword Content: Business blogs provide the opportunity to build incoming traffic from non-branded keywords. For example, if you are a retailer, instead of blogging about your company and products, you should write about retailing best practices. This content will not only help increase search traffic, but also drive better quality prospects to your business' website.

Best Practice #3
Ask your readers what they want: Assumptions can often be wrong, so I think it would be beneficial to conduct a brief survey on your business blog as a way to obtain clear feedback from viewers. (make sure you leave space for comments as well!!)

Best Practice #4
Make sure your blog is clearly connected to your business website: Business blogs can be a major source of new traffic from search engines and social media. It is very important to realize that a blog post may be the first thing a potential customer sees about your company. Having a blog as part of your corporate site either as a subdomain or as a page is an important step to allow first-time visitors to easily learn additional information about your company.

Business blogging can be a very important tool, and can generate content that search engines value and people enjoy sharing on social networks. I liked #2 the most! Building a "society" of supporters based on keywords and "hot topic (industry) items" is a brilliant way to build traffic that will most likely have an interest in the products/services your business provides.