Congratulations! You’ve started up a blog for your business and have been blogging steadfastly each week (or even every day) on it. And while it’s certainly enjoyable to work on and play around with, for whatever reason the company blog is lacking a certain amount of foot traffic coming in. Is anybody even reading your posts? Maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but you don’t want to sit around waiting for readers to slowly trickle in. It’s time to start building and keeping an audience for your blog without relentlessly plugging yourself night and day on Facebook and Twitter (“check out MAH BLOG!”) to the point where everyone feels tired of your blog before they’ve even begun to start reading it.
Write Compelling Titles and Content
What inevitably makes or breaks a blog in the end is the quality of the writing found there. If the content is consistently strong and on topics that a reader would expect to find and genuinely want to know more about, the blog will develop a reputation for what it offers that will help carry it far. Start your company blog off on the right foot by creating well-written and thoughtful blog posts with titles that are short, to the point, and draw the reader in as much as possible. Employ a similar process for the blog posts too – they don’t need to be epic sagas. Less is more and provides the reader less of a reason to leave midway through reading because it just got to be too long.
Not a writer? Look into working with a freelancer who can help create solid content for you. Not working in an industry where a wordy blog is right for you? Fill up your blog with creative videos, photos, and quick blurbs to illustrate what’s happening in each post.
Avoid Cheap Tricks
“One lucky commenter will win a free mug!” Ah, the old reel ‘em in with a freebie approach. While not a bad thing to utilize when you’re first starting out and want to begin establishing a name for yourself online, the more you do it the less readers arrive to your blog in search of expertise. They’re in it for a gift card and you can’t constantly offer up a gift card as an incentive to read every new post. Use your giveaway once wisely and save the follow-ups for later once your blog builds up a strong following and presence.
Bring on the Guest Bloggers!
Ideally when you first start blogging, you’ll want to interact with the readers and those who leave behind comments as much as possible. But starting out usually means starting from the ground up and seldom does that ground include instant interaction immediately. Begin looking into having partners with your business and established writers offer up some guest blog posts to your site. It’s a great way for these writers to share their story and bring in a readership that might not have stopped by to your site before. And vice versa on this one – offer to write a blog post for their company blog too!
Always Include Sharing Buttons…
The key here is to cast a wide net when it comes to sharing your blog posts. Include easy to find buttons with every post that allow the reader to instantly Facebook, Tweet, Pin, Stumble, or share on LinkedIn the article they just read.
… and Add Tags and Categories While You’re At It
Internally, this will help keep your posts more organized on key topics that you write often about and allow you to find certain niche topics easily. Externally, it does a similar service for the reader looking to find a particular post they read a week ago but don’t remember the name of. Rather than scroll endless through a series of pages to find it, they can make a beeline for the category or archive instead. Always keep these as updated as possible and make the tags as content-relevant as you can, rather than making up your own tag names. It’s definitely fun to do, but it doesn’t make it any easier to help find you.
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