Business blogging has become a key aspect of websites for many marketers – the reason why – because it works. Blogging not only generates website traffic for your business but it can also help generate interest in your company, create a community with your customers and audience, and help with search engine optimisation. However, it’s important to understand the best practices of blogging. To help you create the best potential for your blog and avoid a train wreck, we’ve created a short list of some of the dos and don’ts of blogging.
Do’s:
- Do: Be direct. Get to the point quickly. Avoid rambling at all costs; it bores customers away from your website.
- Do: Be professional AND friendly. Do not be curt, short or use an academic voice. Adopt a chatty style that will engage readers and make them want more.
- Do: Be accurate, proofread and spellcheck before publishing a blog post. There’s no worse turn-off than a blog post that’s poorly written with incorrect spellings. Preview all drafts before publishing, make sure the layout is pleasing to the eye and make the most of the spellcheck option.
- Do: Use short snappy sentences and avoid complex words. Don’t assume that your audience comes from an academic/specialist background, use words everyone would be familiar with.
- Do: Keep paragraphs to a minimal length. Paragraphs should only be three or four sentences, not half a page long.
- Do: Use visually pleasing sources, for example pictures, graphics, and video will boost your post both on your blog and in social media. Pictures and graphics are also a great way to split up large chunks of text.
- Do: Use bullet points whenever possible. People love lists so use them, they’re aesthetically pleasing to the brain. Which is why this blog is formatted as a bullet pointed list.
- Do: Ask your readers a lot of questions and listen to what they say, then blog more about it, make your blog personal, about the customers, make them the focal point so they can relate to your posts.
- Do: Highlight members of your staff to make your blog seem more human. Profile your staff members and create an interactive question and answer post for each member of your staff.
- Do: Link your blog posts to your social media sites. This encourages your readers to spend more time on your blog.
- Do: Read other people’s blogs. Improving your blogging skills is all about seeing what else is out there in the market.
Don’ts:
- Don’t: Ramble with long, never-ending sentences that drag. In other words, don’t use complex sentences.
- Don’t: Write in complicated fonts, for example, Freestyle Script, Bookman, or anything others which are hard to read. Try not to make the font ambiguous or that little bit too fancy.
- Don’t: Complicate your blog post by trying to write about too many topics at once. Break up content into multiple blog posts. Each blog post should have a different subject and should stick to that one particular area.
- Don’t: Use slang, unprofessional language or jargon. If you do use jargon, explain what it means.
- Don’t: Use other people’s images and words without permission and crediting. This could have potentially damaging consequences for your business.
- Don’t: Give up if your first blog doesn’t get as many views and shares as you had hoped for. Building a successful blog takes time and patience. Slow and steady wins the race.
- Don’t: Spend all your time researching other people’s blogs and reading examples and not actually writing your own blog.
- Don’t: Get political. Your business blog is not your own personal column in the weekly newspaper. Stick to industry topics that apply to your audience. It is not the place for you to splash your political beliefs and views, especially if it is not relevant to your business and your audience.
- Don’t: Become too sales focused; your blog is not an online advert. It should be there to help your audience, a place for them to come for advice. Yes, promote your services, but don’t push so hard that you end up driving your clients away from your blog.
Happy blogging,
Ella Walker.
