Helpful Tips to Successfully Blog for Your Company

[By Sarah Faglio]

Blogging is essential in helping a company expand its online presence in attracting qualified leads and creating customers.  With U.S. users spending 3X more time on blogs and social media than in e-mail, companies need to adjust to where their target audience is.  Blogs that are integrated with your website is able to add to its SEO value (helping your company rank higher in search engine results), essentially driving in more traffic for users interested in your industry.

Top 10 Tips for Successful Professional Blogging

1. Integrate blog with your website. By creating your blog on the same domain as your website, you are enabling the fresh content and traffic from your blog to be attributed to your website's SEO value.  Your blog could be added to your website as a sub-domain (i.e. http://blog.website.com) or in a folder of your website (i.e. http://website.com/blog).
2. Do not focus solely on your company.  Users go to your blog to learn about the industry and information that is relevant to them.  If you just write about your company, your accomplishments and products or services then users become disinterested since it is not relevant to them.  Your content needs to be written for your target audience as a place where they can learn about your industry, not a place filled with advertising or self-promotion.
3. Publish new content frequently.  In order to keep an active blog, you need to publish updated posts at least 2-3 times a week.  Freshly updated content puts it high in search engine results when users are searching for topics similar to what you are writing about.
4. Optimize content for search.  Proper keyword placement throughout your blog helps it to rank higher on organic search results for that terms.  Placing keywords at the beginning of the title and throughout the post helps it get indexed and ranked higher by search engines.  Meta-keywords and alt-tags in pictures also attribute to your organic search traffic. 
5. Use social media.  Promoting your blog updates on your company's other social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+) alerts your followers, people interested in your company or industry.  This draws traffic to your blog and essentially increases readership and popularity of your posts.  Adding social media shares at the end of your posts make it easier for readers to share your content on their own social media accounts to spread to their followers.  Being engaged in blogging communities also helps to spread your content to interested readers.
6. Optimize for lead generation.  Intriguing blog posts are able to draw in a strong leadership, but as a business it is important to know who these visitors are.  Many of them have the potential to be qualifed leads and paying customers.  By placing links throughout the blog post to call-to-action landing pages, you are able to develop a list of qualified leads who you can nurture into customers.
7. Using blog analytics.  Traffic, referring sites and popularity of posts are the essential analytic details of your blog that help you to determine potential strengths and weaknesses.  This helps you to learn which topics are the most popular and are most interesting to your readers.  By learning what your followers enjoy reading, you know what topics to write about for future posts that would generate the most interest.  Referring sites, such as specific social media account, provide insight into how useful those sites are to the success of your blog.
8. Comment box.  Comment boxes allow readers to give feedback and voice their opinions on your blog posts.  By closing off this option, you are preventing dialog between your company and a potential customer.  This also grants readers the opportunity to ask questions, allowing you to reply with suggestions or solutions to their problems (that possibly your product or service could provide).  If there are any inappropriate responses, you are able to delete them or moderate them before they are visible on your site.
9. Post new entries in the morning.  Research shows that the best time to share new content is in the morning, since that is when blog entries are read the most often.
10. Be professional.  Avoid trash talking competition, clients etc., as well as be as professional and relevant to your industry as possible.  You want to be viewed as the subject matter expert in your industry, so you need to attain respect from your audience that comes from maintaining a professional blog.

A recent 2011 ROI study found that 69% of companies attribute their lead generation success to blogging.  Studies have shown the significant contribution that blogging makes to the successful of a company's online presence and website. However, upon maintaining a blog for your company, make sure you pay attention to these tips in order to be the most productive and successful in your blogging endeavors.