If you own a business, you already know that blogging isn’t just a cool way to communicate with your customers; it’s an imperative part of a social media strategy, digital marketing initiative, and a huge way to improve your search engine optimization marketing. In fact, your business blog can be the absolute most cost-effective way to market your business – if you do it right.

Tips for Your Business Blog

Here are our top tips on better business blogs:

Stop advertising

You might be tempted to make each and every post about how great your company or product is, but your customers will not only see through this, but they’ll get bored.

Instead of writing a blog with the view of a salesperson, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What are they interested in? What do they need? What fascinates them? If your blogs can address your customers’ needs and interests, you’re bound to get more readers – and that’s the marketing ploy, not that overt advertisement for your weekend sale. Also, never, ever use generic, vague stock photography like this. It’s the biggest turn-off to people.

Build personas

In the same vein, if you don’t know your customers, it’s time to get to work. Before you can blog effectively to your audience, you need to know who they are – and what makes them tick. Start by creating customer personas, or profiles of your average customer. Feel free to do some real research via social media or even a customer survey that will give you some great information from which to build your personas.

Don’t talk like a business

You might be used to writing corporate memos or business policies, but all that business-speak is lost on your customer. So instead of infiltrating your content with annoying phrases like “world-class,” “cutting-edge,” and “customer-centric business strategy,” for the love of all that is good – start speaking like a human.

Make your titles count

These days, online attention spans are ever-dwindling. You have to grab your customers’ attention before they move on to the next shiny object (or video, or quiz, etc.) online. That’s why it’s super important to make your headlines count. Would you be interested enough to read the entire article? If not, don’t expect your customers to be either.

Lead them to water

Like a great headline, your introduction should also pack some punch. After all, if your reader is bored in the first sentence, he’s likely not going to make it to the second. Make sure your first paragraph is interesting. Vignettes or analogies can be a good way to go, since your reader will be interested in the story while wondering what position or point will follow.

Start an email list

Sure, you can start writing and posting blogs and simply hope that your customers will find their way to your site to read them. Or you can send them a personal invitation, complete with a glimpse of why the content is relevant to them. This is why it’s important to create and maintain a customer email list. This way, you can “feed” the consumption of your content by urging users to read, comment on and share your content. If you’re not sure how to begin gathering emails, it can help to begin by inserting a form prominently on your web page. It’s always helpful to offer a perk – like a discount or freebie – in exchange for email sign-up.