7 Blogging Tips for Business

There’s no getting around it, businesses invest an astonishing amount of time and resources into blogging even though only a fraction ever really brings real value. Most of it sits unread somewhere, gathering digital dust.

So why do they do it?

The potential is simply too great to ignore. Done well, the value add is tremendous. So why don’t more companies do blogging well? In short, they’re not following the blogging tips that will help them avoid the biggest pitfalls. Fortunately, we’ve compiled 7 straightforward ones to get your business blogging on track and in the green.

1. Use a variety of media
2. Use as many platforms as possible
3. Choose the right partners
4. Repurpose
5. Create experiments
6. Leverage your audience
7. Develop a connection over time

In nearly a decade of business blogging, I’ve rarely seen a company do more than basic text blogging. Video, audio, even custom images are a rarity. The reason almost any company will give is simple: cost. Putting out a simple blog post is just far cheaper than creating custom media.

However, that’s only the case if you treat each type of media you’re creating as its own separate project. By repurposing episodic content it’s possible to create video, audio, images, and blog posts far more efficiently. With this system, you can leverage the fact that different types of media perform better on different platforms. Instead of using blogging as a one-size-fits-all strategy, you can create a variety of content which can interlink and support each other.

Creating more types of content like video, audio, images, and text and then putting this content out on more media platforms increases the chances you’ll get noticed. Too often, businesses assume that being present on LinkedIn and maybe Facebook is enough, but they’re missing out on the opportunities offered by platforms like YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and more. They also assume one type of media is sufficient, but different media types will resonate with different audiences, so experimentation is key to find what works.

For example, you may have assumed your business’ ideal customer is only on LinkedIn but discover that you can reach them even better on Youtube. Or, you may have assumed that text content is best for reaching your audience, but video actually performs better on many platforms.

This brings us to the second advantage: learning. By creating more content in various media types and distributing it on my platforms, you’re increasing your ability to gather data and learn about your audiences and customers. By transforming your blogging into a tool for both driving new customers and learning more about your customers, you’re boosting your blogging ROI.

Bringing in an external person or agency for help in blogging is commonplace, but often it’s done without much thought. The search is usually simply for someone to do the writing or help with the editing. But the challenge of blogging better isn’t usually about improving the quality of the writing, it’s about having an effective overall strategy.

A partner agency can provide far more value this way without necessarily costing much more than a team of writers, editors, and SEO experts. AI-driven tools can perform more of the work involved with repurposing content than you might think. The bigger picture here is to approach partners for business blogging with the big picture in mind instead of looking to hire for narrow roles.

This is where the real value add of approaching business blogging differently comes. When you write a traditional blog post, that’s it. You write, edit, etc. and at the end you have a single piece of content to put out and possibly promote. Then, it’s on to the next one. But using content repurposing changes that dynamic entirely.

Instead, you spend more time creating a larger piece of content (congrats, it’s got a better chance of ranking anyways). Then, you take that content and create smaller pieces of content from it. Now instead of promoting a single blog post, you’re promoting 3 short videos, a podcast episode, 2 blog posts, 4 chart images, etc. all derived from that initial piece of content.

In military terms, it’s what you might call a force multiplier. It allows your blogging efforts to achieve far more without dramatically increasing the inputs required, leading to better ROI.

Here’s yet another way to improve your overall ROI from the blogging you’re doing. Instead of simply treating each piece of content you put out as a chance to draw in more customers, you can use them as experiments to test theories and learn more about those customers.

By repurposing twice in each round of content creation, you can improve your experiments by tweaking the original batch of content before putting out a second batch to see how the performance changes. This lets you narrow in on why something might be performing well or poorly, giving you better quality conclusions you can use throughout your business.

Most blogging is a one-way street. You put out content and hopefully someone consumes it. But you can derive a lot more value out of blogging by using it as a chance to gather information and ideas from your audience. The experiments we just mentioned are a part of this, but truly getting the most out of the audience you can build with better blogging goes much further.

This can be as simple as asking your audience on various social media platforms which part of a video, podcast, or article resonated with them. This gives you ideas for what you can put into new content and test with new experiments.

Ultimately, all of these blogging tips add up to creating more meaningful content and more meaningful connections with your audience. Instead of producing cookie-cutter blog posts, a sustained effort producing longer and higher-quality content which is repurposed and put out on many platforms allows you to build stronger connections with your audience. For just about any brand, those connections are tremendously valuable.

To wrap these tips up, start thinking about your blogging as a way to create lots of content, engage audiences in more places, develop higher quality connections, test ideas, and accomplish more. This is the future of business blogging and the faster you can adapt, the better off you’ll be. If you’d like to learn more about choosing partners to help you achieve more with your efforts, book a time to chat with us.