While many businesses take on the personality of their owners, business blogging and personal blogging usually require different strategies because of the difference in topic, audience and visibility. Business blogging can have personality, but to be effective, it must also employ a strategy. On your personal blog, the audience may or may not have a vested interest in the topics you present, but there is usually no expectation of consistency or quality. For your business blog on the other hand, your audience is your customers, potential customers, competitors and other experts in your field. As such, there are expectations of the type, quality and consistency of the content you will publish on your business blog or website.

website researchResearch

Before you do anything, you want to figure out where your business fits in the digital space. Search Google or Bing to see where you rank for a general search of your business. Search for your competitors, as well as terms you expect people to use when looking for a business like yours. You should also take a look at search engine optimization opportunities for your website in order to guide your blogging efforts.

Maintain Your Focus

If you’re an auto mechanic, your blog shouldn’t be focused on the local sports team, unless you’re one of their sponsors. When you are making the decisions as to what type of information you are going to publish on your business blog, you need to focus on what your site visitors are looking for. As a business owner in your field, you will be looked at as an expert on a variety of topics. Those are the topics that you should focus on when deciding what to write about in your blog.

Plan Ahead

While you will sometimes be able to spontaneously throw something together that is brilliant, the majority of the time you will need to have a plan. A plan allows you to think about how you are going to handle your topics one time, so that you don’t have to think about it each time it’s time to write a blog post. Once you’ve decided what topics you are going to cover, create a plan on how you will approach each topic. Will you create a series of articles on one topic or will you rotate topics methodically. You could also decide to cover topics based on traffic patterns within your analytics or in Google Webmaster Tools. Any way you decide to approach it, you need to create a plan so that you can focus on creating the content. Things may come up that will cause you to rethink or change your plan, but a plan will save you time in the long run.

clock calendar scheduleCreate a Schedule

Once you have created a plan for which topics you will cover and how you will be adding them to your business blog, you need to create a schedule that fits in with your other tasks and responsibilities. When creating a schedule, you may realize that you don’t have time to maintain a blog and it’s time to find someone else to do it for you. Either way, you need to create a schedule that is realistic and reasonable within your current time and resource constraints.

Follow Through

As a famous shoe company started saying over 25 years ago, you have to “Just Do It!” For me, personally, that is always the hardest part. Even with planning and a schedule, things come up that will outrank creating blog content on your list of priorities. Make sure you account for this by building up a queue of scheduled content or making sure that someone is responsible for the content who will be able to follow through, even if things come up.