5 traits of a great business blog

A blog should be at the heart of every business’ marketing strategy. I’ve covered the reasons why you should have a blog before, so in this post I’ll look at what makes a great business blog and how you can go about writing one that achieves your brand goals, keeps people coming back to read more AND increases sales.

So what makes a great business blog?

Depth and detail

Really successful business blogs, those  that draw in traffic and links from beyond the inner circle of their customers, do so because they cover topics in detail and depth.

Broad over views are fine, but with so much great content out there, yours has to be great to be really noticed and then shared.

For example, rather than a blog post that gives a brief, descriptive over view on a topic why not write a comprehensive guide on how to use something that people find useful. I guarantee more people will want to share it.

Obviously this means more time investment is required to write these in depth articles. However, if this means you blog less often I would say it is worth it.

It is better to blog once a week and draw in lots of traffic than once a day and have a small readership.

Here are some great examples of blog posts that focus on quality over quantity:

• How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months & How You Can Do It Too!
• The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation
• How to build a massive audience on Instagram

Show more than your brand’s personality

Your blog should always reflect your brand values, but it is also a great opportunity to show the people behind your business and a less formal side to the brand’s personality.

For example, I would recommend using “I” rather than “we” and empower the blog to speak from personal experience and opinion.

This helps break down the barriers between your company and your customers/ readers and increases their affinity with you as they can see there are real people behind the business.

A faceless company is a cold monolith we struggle to build emotional ties to and we naturally warm to people and find it much easier to establish some form of connection with a name and a photo.

Some great examples of blogs that showcase their staff and their voice:

• Moz.com’s whiteboard Fridays
• Dropbox’s blog shows there are real people behind a very technical product
• Zendesk’s entire marketing is an exercise in showing personality. Here is their blog.

No blog is an island

Writing a standalone blog is wasting a great opportunity to get your fantastic content out there. Promote and use your blog content across your social media channels, customer newsletter and if it is truly great, recycle the content in other forms e.g. PDF guides.

Mix and match your content

Blogs are wonderfully adaptable and flexible to what ever you need them to be at any one time. This is something for you to embrace and use to your advantage.

Keep your readers coming back for more and sharing your content by mixing things up writing long form posts, opinion pieces, company news, product launches, promotions, competitions, interviews, resource round-ups… etc.

Kissmetrics is a great example of this in practise:

• Share an infographic they created
• A guest post from another company
• X examples of Y style post
• In depth post on a topic
• A quiz
• Share their webinar

Those  examples were all pretty much published back to back very recently.

Calls to action and internal linking 

A good business blog should encourage your readers to take some form of action.  This can be contained within the blog through links to other posts, getting them to leave a comment or sharing the post via social media.

It can also be more sales focused by turning the reader as a lead (e.g. leave your details to have a resource emailed to you) or even making a sale (e.g. blog reader exclusive 10% off if you buy now).  

I’d also recommend opening links to other content in a new window/tab so your readers don’t leave your blog.

Further reading

Here are some more examples of business blogs you can learn from as well as where to find resources to teach yourself starting a business blog.