The main aim of a business blog is to bring customers to your website and to associate your brand with their requirements. Therefore, the more regular readers you have, the more word-of-mouth you are likely to attract and the more successful your blog will be. So how can you turn casual readers into a fan club?

One of the most crucial points of your business blog for grabbing readers is the ‘call to action’, usually a single word that inspires a reader to join your blog. The most popular term in Internet parlance is ‘subscribe’, which can cause confusion among some readers. Off-line, subscriptions usually incur a financial charge, whereas you want your readers to sign up for free. You may like to consider ‘join’ or ‘follow’ as less loaded alternatives. This will apply both within your blog and any ‘sign-up’ buttons.

As variety is the spice of life, it’s best to offer several ways to follow your business blog. RSS is a relatively new technology, popular among web-savvy clients, but not currently accepted into popular use. For clients who aren’t up to speed – you may like to offer an email subscription feed, which follows a more traditional format.

Like most aspects of creating a business blog, your two key aims are to be clear and inclusive. If you apply this to your language, your overall tone and your formatting you’ll quickly see passers-by turn into pals.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix. Tariffs start from just £150 per month.

Linkedin is one of the most high profile social media platforms that was specifically designed for business networking. It has over 60 million members across 200 countries, so there’s a very good chance a lot of your business contacts are using it. Here are 5 ways to use Linkedin for business:

1)    Connect with everyone

OK so not everyone you’re ever met, seen or heard of, but certainly everyone you know in a business context. Start with your colleagues, and then expand your list of contacts by inviting your clients and suppliers to connect with you. Are you on any other social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook? It’s likely many of your contacts on those sites will also be on Linkedin so connect with them too. Finally, if you attend industry events, such as conferences or networking receptions, invite everyone you meet there to connect with you on Linkedin, including journalists and bloggers. It won’t be long until you’ve built up a strong network of business contacts. Linkedin provides several tools to help you locate people you know who have profiles on the site – try the ‘People You May Know’ column on the home page, and the email address book search tool.

2)    Create a group

Linkedin has a Groups feature, which – if used correctly – can be a great platform for you to initiate dialogue with your customers. Set up a group that is relevant to your industry (for example, we recently set up a group called Content Marketing for SMEs), invite all of your contacts and encourage them to engage in discussion.

3)    Join other people’s groups

As well as setting up your own groups, sign up to other groups that are populated by your target customers and join in the conversation.

4)    Answer questions

Search for relevant questions using the Linkedin answers tool and provide free, helpful advice. You’ll be surprised how frequently this can turn into new business for your company.

5)    Set up a company profile

It is now possible to create a separate Linkedin profile for your company in addition to your individual profile. You can brand the page with your logo, write a description of your company’s products and services and link to your company’s website and business blog. Make sure you take full advantage of this feature by including your keywords throughout the profile: this will boost the chances of it being listed in both internal and external search results.

Remember Write My Site offers social media management services, and this can include running your Linkedin activities. Get in touch for a free consultation if this is of interest.

What’s the first thing you think about when writing a blog for business? The answer should be your audience. No matter who your target demographic is, they are always your number one priority in creating content. A business blog is different from a personal blog, in that it should aim to generate a following, not simply to share the latest goings-on within the company with anyone who’s interested (sadly, few people outside of the business will care whether you’ve changed stationery suppliers).

Once you’ve identified your audience, your first question should be; How can I capture their interest? Statistics, jokes, anecdotes and rhetorical questions all serve to create an engaging introduction. You just need to decide which is most likely to appeal to your audience. A scientific-minded group may be grabbed by a startling statistic; younger audiences by an anecdotal joke.

A typical reader will have time constraints and probably the same relatively short attention-span that applies to most web-users. Therefore, to accommodate them you need to write clearly and concisely. While good writing is essential, a business blog is not the place for linguistic hyperbole or fancy ideas. Overdressing your content in metaphors, similes and long-winded sentences creates a diversion, ultimately distracting the reader and weakening your message.

Business blogs should aim to be interactive, and appeal to readers’ imaginations. To reinforce this connection you next want to address your tone. An overtly formal tone can over-complicate sentences and seem patronising. Keep a relatively conversational tone, free of slang, buzz words or jargon. The latter is especially important if your audience is non-specialist, as technical terms can be extremely alienating.

Putting yourself in the reader’s place will greatly enhance your business blog writing and increase interest in your website. Just bear in mind at all times – there is no ‘I’ in blog.

With more than 350 million active users, Facebook is almost certainly populated by a good chunk of your customer base. The social networking giant is free to use, and has recently introduced “fan” pages for businesses.

Setting up a Facebook fan page is easy: simply click on this link and follow the instructions. The real question is why should you set one up? Here are five reasons why setting up a Facebook fan page could be a great move for your organisation:

1)    Free of charge. It costs nothing but a few minutes of your time to create a Facebook fan page and to send the link to all your contacts.

2)    Effective list-builder. Everyone who becomes a fan will have your page listed on their profile. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends*, you can introduce your business to 13,000 people with just 100 fans.

3)    Shout louder. Won an award? Received some favourable press coverage? Announce it on your Facebook page and have the news picked up by your fans in real-time.

4)    Direct customer feedback. E-commerce retailers in particular can benefit from speedy feedback from customers when they post photos and descriptions of new products.

5)    Blog promotion. If you have a business blog, you can post links to each update from your Facebook fan page and benefit from extra traffic to your website.

To see a Facebook fan page in action, have a look at ours (and become a fan if you like what you see!). We use it primarily to raise the profile of our blog, whereas several of our clients use theirs to research new product and service ideas, or to build up their database of contacts.

Talk to Write My Site about managing a Facebook fan page for your business.

*http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

There are hundreds of blogs out there, all clamouring for your readers’ attention. So how can you make yours stand out from the crowd? Here’s a quick guide to making maximum impact with minimum fuss.

First of all, be concise. This is not just dictated by your word-limit, but also by the demands of selling. Your readers will all have time demands of their own and will probably be only scanning your article and so you need to get your point across quickly and clearly to make an impression.

There are several ways to achieve this effect. The most obvious is to keep your sentences short.  Brief sentences keep arguments digestible and easy to follow. They also force you to be direct in your writing, cutting out all elements of ‘purple prose’ and unnecessary adjectives. Too many adjectives can cloud an argument, distance a client and blunt your message. Be ruthless. If it has no grammatical purpose and doesn’t add information to your sentence – cut it out.

Blogs are designed to persuade and provoke; therefore if you truly want to engage with your reader then express your point of view. In allowing for all contingencies you create flabby writing which doesn’t put your message across clearly. As a result, your company is projected as weak and indecisive. So pick an angle and make your case. Not only will your writing be much clearer than if you equivocate, you’ll also be more likely to provoke discussion amongst your reader.

Applying simple rules such as these can have a big impact on your blog and the way your message is perceived, memorised and acted upon.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix. Tariffs start from just £150 per month.

What do you want your website content to do for your business? You probably want to attract the attention of search engines, to raise your online profile and to gain potential clients’ confidence in your business. One way you can help achieve all of these goals is to include a ‘News’ section on your website.

The most efficient news sections are designed to be quickly updatable and usually keep news items to 250 or so words, an ideal length for attracting Internet readers. This can always link to a longer article on your company blog if you feel there is more to say. However, if you do create longer versions, ensure they have a purpose. As with all web content, news items and associated articles should be kept clear and concise. Use exactly as many words as you need - not a single letter more. A regular schedule of fresh content means your site will be crawled more often by the search engines.

A frequently updated website also sends a strong signal to potential customers that you are an active and dynamic company. It gives them an insight into your aims, achievements and work in the current market that product descriptions and static pages can’t achieve. To this end, consider a variety of news posts on a variety of topics. Types of posts may include articles on product and company news (upgrades, promotions, recent press coverage); as well as wider industry news.

Online news sections can work really well in tandem with business blogs: the former can demonstrate your organisation’s leadership in its industry, whereas the latter offers a more informal platform for potential customers to interact.

1)    It’s gotta be regular! If you want your website to appear anywhere in Google, you MUST update it with fresh SEO content on a regular basis. At a minimum, you need to be adding content to your site once a week – if you can do it more often, that’s even better. The operative word here is “adding”. There’s a mistaken belief in some circles that you should re-write your existing pages on a regular basis, when in fact it’s adding new content that will really boost your chances in the search engines. Try to ensure that the majority of your SEO content is unique. It’s OK to post an occasional piece of content from another site but keep in mind that Google is looking for sites with something original to say.

2)    Write a blog. A lot of websites are “static”, i.e. basic brochure-style sites with content that don’t really need embellishing or updating. Installing a blog is therefore a neat solution to the problem of needing to add regular content. The blog can have its own section on the site (www.sitename.co.uk/blog) and any number of posts can be added without disrupting the overall usability of the website. If you use a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress for your blog, you’ll find it’s as easy to use as Microsoft Word. Lace your blog articles with your keywords and link those keywords to other pages of your site for extra SEO brownie points.

3)    Say something useful. A business blog is only as good as the topics it writes about. After all, you want the readers to engage with your carefully crafted SEO content and subsequently take an interest in your products and services. What do your customers find interesting and useful? The reason our own SEO content focuses on blogging is because we’re a team of article writers and blog writers and we want to attract readers who share our interests. Don’t make the mistake of using your business blog as your personal diary. Your blog needs a consistent theme that’s relevant to the needs and interests of its readership.

We have today published the results of our blogging survey and we were not surprised to discover that 70% of the small businesses we interviewed struggle to find the time to keep their blogs up-to-date.

We asked 125 small business owners about their blogging habits and found that, while 62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month. The remaining 71% have admitted they just weren’t able to find the time to maintain their blogs.

The survey focused almost exclusively on very small businesses, as these organisations tend not to be able to afford the ‘people power’ that larger businesses can leverage. 42% of our interviewees were one-man-bands; and a further 43% worked within organisations with 1-5 employees with the remaining 15% working for larger organisations.

The full release is available in our Press section. Please feel free to reproduce as long as Write My Site receives a credit and a link back to www.writemysite.co.uk.

As providers of blogging services it goes without saying that we’re super-keen on the idea of every business including a blog as part of their online strategy. Even if you’re not going to ask Write My Site to write it for you, here are the top five reasons why a blog is a great idea for your business:

1)    You can establish yourself as an authority in your industry

Christophe Langlois is a good example of this. His blog, Visible-Banking.com, is the leading independent blog focused on social media in banking and financial services. As a result, Christophe is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and other high profile events. At Econsultancy’s Future of Digital Marketing conference last week, Christophe said none of this would have happened without his blog.

2)    Business blogging is a great way to gain a following of customers (and future customers)

If your content is interesting, people will come back to read more of it. Simple.

3)    The search engines – especially Google – love sites with regularly updated content.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) basically boils down to three things: one is having your site built in an SEO friendly way (talk to your web developer); the second is getting other sites to link to your site; and the third is fresh, unique content. A blog is the perfect way to achieve two out of these three aims: a good blog will not only provide the search engines with the regular content they’re looking for, it will also generate inbound links when other websites refer to your articles.

4)    Business blogs provide regular opportunities to use your keywords

Look at how many times you can see the words “business blog” in this article. It’s one of our keywords and as soon as this business blog post (see?) goes live, the post and its keywords will be indexed by Google.

5)    Blogs give you a great excuse to direct people towards your website

Write an interesting article for your business blog and then link to it from Twitter, Ecademy and online forums. It’s the perfect way to bring your website to the attention of potential customers.

We’ve put together a little survey for UK businesses in order to find out who’s blogging and how often they’re doing it.

The survey has been designed to help inform us about people’s views on business blogging. We want to know whether UK businesses see blogging as an important part of their search engine optimisation or PR strategies. We’re also interested in finding out whether the size or industries of the businesses who respond to the survey make a difference to the way blogging is viewed. The results so far are looking pretty interesting: many of our most enthusiastic business bloggers are in the professional services or marketing industries, and most are small businesses (fewer than 6 employees).

Plenty of studies have issued depressing findings about the number of abandoned blogs floating around in cyberspace, but based on the responses so far, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that in fact small businesses are well aware of the benefits of having a blog. Early results from our survey suggest that the only thing stopping small businesses from maintaining their blogs as often as they would like is time - very few people are of the opinion that a blog wouldn’t be beneficial to their business. In fact, even amongst the people who haven’t yet got a blog, the most common reason is simply that they haven’t yet found time to set it up. Of the people who do have a business blog, 70% said they update it less frequently now than they used to, because of time pressures – this certainly tallies with the most common reason people give for using our corporate blogging service!

We’ll be releasing more results as and when the number of respondents rises. If you’d like to take part, go to our online business blogging survey and fill out the ten questions on the form. It will take no more than five minutes of your time. Please feel free also to post your views about business blogging on this thread.