7 Ways for Making Your Business Blog Be All It Can Be

Remember the U.S. army’s “Be All You Can Be” campaign? It was an incredibly popular recruiting slogan that was used for over 20 years until it was retired in 2006. How about your business blog, is it all it can be for your online venture?

I’m assuming you want your business blog to be more than just a personal journal. One way or another, you want to make money with your business blog. Be it directly with AdSense ads, affiliate ads or promoting your own information products. You want your blog to become the hub that attracts traffic, establishes your credibility and ultimately, converts into more sales.

How do you turn your business blog into a powerful sales tool? I’ve listed 7 business blogging tips here just to get you started.

1. Have a plan: Even before you start writing content and posting, you need to have a clear goal in mind. What do you want that post to do for your business? Are you pre-selling an affiliate product? Do you want to increase awareness about your niche? Are you providing a solution to a vexing problem for your readers? Is it to establish your credibility and expertise on a particular topic? It will be difficult for you to create a compelling call to action at the end of the post if you don’t have a set business objective in mind. Without that, you would be reporting news and not being an authority in your niche. There are plenty of news portals out there. You don’t want to be another one of those unless you are planning to sell advertisement space on your business blog.

2. Write about what matters to your readers: Sure, you are passionate about your business and want to write everything about it. However, are you addressing the concerns of your readers? It is all about them and not you. Do a bit of keyword/phrase research before deciding on a topic or a title of your posts. Don’t be afraid of putting long tail keywords in your titles so that people searching for those words can find your post. The term ‘long tail’ was first used by Chris Anderson to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets instead of highly competitive broad keywords. You want your blog post to attract the largest target audience.

3. Post often: If you want to build a loyal following for your business blog, you need to post often to keep your content fresh (See my earlier post How Fresh is Your Content?) Your readers will only visit your blog and bookmark it if they can count on you for regular fix of current information. They should look forward to your next post and not left guessing as to when you are going to post again. You don’t have to write a thousand words post each time, shorter posts are good too. Mix them up for variety.

4. Use Private Label Content (PLR): If you are not a prolific writer or short on time, try to use good quality PLR content. The key is to rewrite at least some of the PLR to make it unique to your blog. Change the title, add a new opening paragraph and your own closing. I don’t much care for article spinners because they tend to spit out variations that make little sense to human readers. Begin with a high-quality PLR article and try to rewrite about 30%-50%, more if you plan to submit it to an article directory. I sometimes use PLR articles as “idea generators” or an outline to get me started. One source that consistently delivers top-notch content is Nicole Dean’s EasyPLR.

5. Let form follow function: Your blog’s design should never overwhelm or distract from the content. That’s a basic principle I like to follow when designing a blog, a web site or any type of marketing collateral. The navigation, layout and the placement of every element should guide the reader intuitively in a logical manner. Don’t assume that your readers will take a desired action or click on a link just because you’ve placed it somewhere on the blog. Lead them to it. Do you want them to sign up for your newsletter? Give them multiple ways to do so. Do you want them to visit the sales page for an affiliate product or one of your own? Instead of saying “click here for more information,” write something like, “Want thousands of eager visitors to your site quickly? Get Product Name now…”

6. Optimize your business blog: There are thousands of blogs on the Internet. You need to optimize yours if you want to be found in major search engines. If you use Wordpress for your business blog, you need to download two very useful plugins. The first one is All in One SEO Pack and the second one is Google XML Sitemaps. Both are free to download and will automate some of the SEO chores. Another great plugin I use to encourage people to leave their comments is CommentLuv. (See my earlier post, Show Some Love with CommentLuv.)

7. Learn and “borrow” ideas from others: Let me make it clear here that I’m not advocating that you copy someone else’s blog. This strategy has worked for every “wildly successful netpreneur” that I know. Most aren’t inventors or innovators, they are duplicators who know how to put a new spin on something and differentiate themselves. Now, let me make one thing clear before we go any further. “Borrowing” ideas is not stealing something from someone else. Motivational speaker Anthony Robbins once said, “If you want to be successful, find someone who achieved the results you want and copy what they do, and you’ll achieve the same results.”

There you have it, seven quick ways to make you business blogs even more effective.

Did those tips whet your appetite? If you really want to turn your business blog into a powerful sales generator, you need to get my eBook, “The Business Blogging Handbook.”