Indeed, business blogs can have many, multiple purposes: Some business owners use them to promote their core business; some blog about business because they are having keen interest on the topic; some blogs about business for the single purpose of making money online.
Regardless of your focus in business blogging, you need to ask yourself, “Do I blog for the sake of branding/money or do I really want to benefit others from my blog posts?” Or, here’s another way to put it: “Are you putting some content around your product/service marketing or the other way around?” Your answer will determine how much and what kind of blog traffic you will get from the Internet.
Business blogging tips
Here are some business blogging tips to get traffic and readers to your blog:
1. Never blog for money
Make money online blogging will work only if you can provide value for your readers. From my experience, blogging for the sake of money won’t get you far.
Some biz bloggers are simply put up a blog on business, slap some (random) content on it, and do any possible ways to try making money: Write paid reviews and endorsing something you didn’t even find useful yourself, selling ad spaces to any kind of advertisers, and many other ways. Not that those money making methods from blogs are wrong, but sub-par content quality won’t bring much revenue for your business blog.
2. Promote your own content
Some (or many?) say this is unethical, but I say it’s on the contrary. Submit your own blog posts to social bookmarking sites, tweet about your own blog posts on Twitter, and recommend your network to read your blog posts are not only ethical, they are also essential to do.
For the naysayer, consider this: If you don’t love your own content, how would you expect others to love yours? If you feel you write a good blog post, why won’t you let more people to benefit from it? Here’s another argument – let’s consider ebook writing: Will you promote it? Of course you will! If not, what’s the point of writing an ebook? You would be better off writing a personal, secret business diary instead of a business blog!
Of course, promoting your blog posts excessively will not only getting yourself banned on social media sites, it can also give you negative reputation on your blog and brand image. The key issue is whether you add value to the community or not.
3. Less me, more us
Most business blogs were started by individuals. Many blogs are thriving through the years as a one-person blog. However, I highly suggest you to model your business blog’s to SmallBizTrends.com – A business blog that has evolved into a multi-authored, well-respected small business site offering insights from many point of views. Noobpreneur.com was transformed into a multi-authored blog following the SmallBizTrends.com model.
Underline the phrase “many point of views.” Transforming your one-man-show business blog into a multi-authored blog will allow it to reach a broader audience, resulting in more traffic and readers. Having your business blog run by a number of business bloggers can allow you to focus on other aspects of your blog management.
Now, ideally you should attract small business owners and entrepreneurs to share their expertise to your readers, but whenever this is not achievable, you can always hire paid bloggers to blog for you. All in all, the purpose is to bring diversity on your business blog.
Real life case study
Noobpreneur Business Blog has been around for about 2 years, and through trials and tribulations it survives the competition. This blog’s key to survival is this: We add value to our readers. Period.
Thanks to all Noobpreneur.com business bloggers who are voluntarily share their expertise to the readers, Noobpreneur.com can reach more people, add more value to its readers, and bring more tangible and intangible benefits to the bloggers (including me.) And yes, I – as the Owner/Editor of Noobpreneur.com – promote our own content!
Ivan Widjaya
Small business blogger
Image by cvukom.