Breakdown: What Makes a Great Blog Post and How do I Apply it on my Business Blog?

You’re going through the trouble to start and maintain a blog for your business, so why not make sure you’re doing it right? While there are no great secrets to blogs that gain sizable followings, there are definitely some guidelines that can help you avoid becoming one of the thousands of boring, practically unreadable business blogs on the web.

First, let’s go through a quick list of don’ts.  These are things you really want to stay away from when writing posts for a business blog, unless your aim is to lose readers, drive away potential customers and gain a bad rep for your company.

• Don’t drone on and on about yourself.  You’re really not that interesting.  Your business blog shouldn’t be a means to constantly promote your company – it needs to have value for the reader.  A little self-promotion here and there is fine, but keep it to a minimum.

• Don’t just repost stuff from other blogs. Especially if you fail to give credit to said blog, and make it look as if you wrote the content yourself.  That’s a great way to get negative attention.  It’ll also kill your search engine ranking – Google penalizes sites with duplicate content.

• Don’t constantly post negative things about your competitors.  You’ll come off as a bitter, elitist jerk – not exactly the image you want the public to have of you and your company.

Now, here are the do’s.  Follow these tips, and you’ll be well on your way to blog success.  They’ll help you gain and keep readers, and that’s the point of a blog after all, isn’t it?

• Do write about relevant topics.  Your business blog posts should be related to your industry, your company or to business in general.  Don’t go off on tangents or include random uninteresting personal topics.  The idea of your blog is to gain an audience of readers that look to your blog for expert information on a given topic.

• Do write in plain English with proper grammar and spelling.  You might be tempted to use industry lingo that makes you sound like an expert (and you do want to present yourself as an expert in your field), but it’ll confuse and turn off readers.  Stick to plain English.  Oh, and if you’re a terrible writer, please hire someone.  There’s nothing worse than trying to read a meandering, poorly written post that barely makes sense and/or sounds unintelligent.

• Do keep your posts concise. You’re not writing a book.  Posts should be just long enough to relay important information, tips or news.  Leave out unnecessary details, avoid flowery language and keep paragraphs short and easy to read.

• Do post regularly enough to maintain an audience.  If you randomly publish new posts once or twice a month, your blog won’t be memorable enough for people to keep coming back.  Checking for new posts and always seeing the same thing gets tiresome.  You should update at least once a week – preferably more than that – so readers have fresh content that makes visiting your blog worth their time.

MARKETING | Marketing With No Money: Using Social Media to Grow Your Offline Business

Marketing doesn’t have to be a huge drain on your budget. Online social media allows business owners to connect with the public like never before, providing an outlet for you to get your name out there and get noticed. You don’t have to be an online business to use social media to your advantage; you can use it to grow your offline business, too. Social media comes in many forms, from blogs and microcommunities to video and social bookmarking.

What social media does is create an elevated platform for your content, to give it a broader reach. It’s not a miracle worker – you’ve got to have high quality content in the first place to be successful with it (and how to create viral content is a topic for another day!).

The essence of social media is person-to-person contact. Marketing is no longer about faceless corporations plastering ads all over every possible surface. Consumers want ‘conversational marketing’ – wherein the advertiser actually listens to what they have to say in return. The old yelling-into-a-megaphone routine doesn’t work so well anymore.

Social media isn’t a direct highway to sales – social media users like the notorious Diggers and Stumblers don’t care about your static direct-response website. They want to see unique content that pertains to their interests. That’s why some social media sites work hand-in-hand – like creating your own blog and then using media like Digg, Twitter and Stumbleupon to promote interesting posts. The best use for social media is to boost unique traffic and high quality links, which will in turn create a community of supporters and better search engine rankings.

Once you get the hang of it, using social media isn’t complicated. You might provide updates to new content published on your website via Twitter, or create and upload a how-to video related to your field on YouTube. You could network with others on Facebook and LinkedIn, social networking sites that let you virtually schmooze and make new contacts.

Some of the best online social media resources available are the previously mentioned Twitter, YouTube, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn, Facebook and Digg along with Flickr, Technorati, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. Go to each individual site, take a look around and see what other people are doing with it. It might just inspire you to jump right in and start getting noticed.

A great place to start is this article by social media marketing guru Muhammad Saleem, ‘The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play‘. DoshDosh also has an excellent rundown of the benefits of social media marketing along with some tips on how to use it.