A truly effective blog post will engage the audience and either educate, entertain, or otherwise enlighten. Remember, not everyone who reads the post has to be educated or entertained. On a company blog, you’re trying to appeal to a specific audience – either your customers or people who might search for the terms or keywords you use in your pieces. Lure them in with your content, and then introduce them to what your company has to offer.
A web post should:
- Be at least 400 words long. SEO copywriting guidelines suggest 250 at a bare minimum, but unless a post has a number of pictures, you need four or so paragraphs to tell a story.
- Center around topics within your industry that people have questions about. These can be news stories, how-to articles, or even items of controversy. People who Google topics involving your industry might find you via those new articles, and you may gain new customers.
- Have pictures. Everyone loves them. The more original, interesting ones you can add, the better. If you can show your employees enjoying themselves or demonstrating what your company does, that’s great.
- Highlight company changes, updates, or interactions with the community. If your company does volunteer work or raises money for a good cause, talk about it!
- Include links – both outside and inside. Link to your own content so that new readers have exposure to it. Link to external articles that illustrate your points or give your readers more to explore.
While some businesses products or services automatically lend themselves to chronicling via Instagram or Facebook, plenty of other businesses deal in less photogenic or people-centric things. It’s easy for a hair salon to take makeover pictures and build excitement or pique interest online, but for a manufacturer of parts washers, it can be much more challenging. Pictures of science to not have the same inherent “Wow!” factor, nor are they as likely to go viral on social media.
Still, the goal is to get noticed by the right people, and there are always channels to market to if the right content is produced. A dentist in West Michigan may have the advantage in terms of general interest – nearly everyone has teeth, after all – but that kind of business requires many, many customers to make it profitable. A company that installs loading dock doors in the same geographic area will need to make far fewer, but more targeted sales a reality.
The rules remain the same for both: produce good quality, interesting content, and try to get that content before the eyes of the right people. Follow the above guidelines, and you will build readership and website traffic.
