Having a blog on your business website is a great way to increase traffic and build yourself up as a source of authority in your industry. However, coming up with interesting topics on a regular basis can be quite tricky. This can be made even harder if your business aims its products and services purely at other businesses. Generally speaking, if this is the case you might find yourself struggling to write content that can appeal to a wide enough audience, and also attract important links and a buzz around your website.
What makes a good blog?
So what exactly makes for a good blog? In my opinion a good blog is one that provides useful and informative content. This content should be shareable and something that your readers will want to spread across their social networks and blogs. Unfortunately, simply writing about your product probably wont cut it.
My belief is that you have to try and shift the focus of your blog towards the public, and try to build your website into a useful source of information. Not only will this help increase your traffic and amount of back links, it should also help promote your brand.
The SEOmoz Blog: loads of amazing free tips and tutorials
SEOmoz is a great example; the company started life in the consulting business, but by giving away free tips on their blog they quickly became a global resource for SEO. In particular, their beginners guide to SEO has provided them with thousands of links and huge brand awareness.
In an attempt to help you out, Ive listed a few content ideas below that Ive seen work really well for other websites and theres no reason why they shouldnt work well for you.
Give Some Free Tips
Every industry has areas of speciality, and this means that there will usually be a fair number of people searching on the internet looking for tips and advice. Try to aim these tips at a broad audience and write posts aimed at beginners right through to advanced. For example, if your business specialises in digital printing why not write some blog posts along the lines of Step By Step Guide To Designing Your Wedding Invitations.
Stationary Direct: They give customers direct advice on design and printing
Industry News
Re-hashing industry news is a great way of writing content for your blog. Dont just copy and paste a news article; instead write an informative post giving your opinion on the latest developments in your industry. Try to focus this on what it could mean for your end customer. The real win here is if youre lucky enough to be the first to publish some news. That really is a guaranteed traffic boost for your website!
Interview an Expert
Try to have a think about some of the well known figures in your industry. Is there anyone that you feel could be interviewed on your blog? Again this is a great way of diverting away from simply talking about your products. Interviews are also great because someone else is writing the content for you, and often youll get a good opinion from another source...adding yet more diversity to your blog.
The Londonist: Why not try and scoop a great interview for your blog?
Key Takeaway:
Aim to build your blog into an online resource; provide great content that will establish you as an online hub for information. Not only will this help you gain inbound links and traffic, it will also really help push your brand out to more and more people.
Hopefully these ideas have given you a bit of food for thought.