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.

A blog is one of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your web presence and provides a superb platform for your business to engage potential customers, without resorting to the hard sell. A recent study of 1,500 SMEs found that blogging increased website traffic by an average of 55%. Furthermore, the average company that blogs has 97% more inbound links and a massive 434% more indexed pages than the average company which does not blog.

Having a blog on your website brings huge benefits. However, with only 250-ish words to get your point across (the best blog posts are brief), how can you make your blog stand out and best reflect you?

Before starting you should have identified your main target demographic, as this will largely dictate the tone of voice you adopt within your blog articles. Consultancy businesses may wish to take an advice-led approach to display their expertise, for example. Whatever your decision, make sure your chosen voice is an authentic representative of you; there is no point writing in a ‘teenage’ voice if your business is a luxury catering service.

Once you have your style, you want to look at your substance. Blogs should contain certain keywords that will get your site ranked by the search engines, but without becoming a blatant sales platform. They are an amazing way to show off a wider knowledge to your customers, informing, helping and sparking debate. For example, if you sell wedding dresses, you may wish to highlight new catwalk shows, provide handy hints on finding the ideal accessories or ask if white really is the best colour for the big day.

Finally, remember that blogs are interactive, so don’t be afraid to express an opinion and start a debate. However, do try to present a balanced argument; it lends your blog credence and inspires thoughtful and considered responses.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix.

One of the best ways to get your company name out there in cyberspace is to publish articles – both on your own blog and on other people’s. Ask other bloggers if they will publish your article along with a link back to your site – as long as what you’re writing about is relevant to them, and the nature of your business is not in direct competition with theirs, most bloggers will agree to let you do this – after all, they get some free web content out of it.

There are a number of things you need to consider when it comes to blog writing. First, you need to pitch your idea to the blog on which you want to publish an article. It’s a good strategy to pitch the idea before writing the article itself as a) you’ll find out straightaway if your proposed article isn’t of interest and b) it’s a good opportunity to get some guidance about how to shape your article.

When a blogger has given you the green light to write an article for their website, make sure you keep the readers of the blog in mind at all times. This will help you to ensure that both the content and style are appropriate for the people who are going to read the blog.

You also need to keep the blog owner in mind. What are their objectives? They are likely to want website content that’s optimised with particular keywords. Earn extra brownie points by finding out what these keywords are and working them into your article. If your writing helps the blog attract traffic from the search engines you will almost certainly be invited back to write for it again!

Finally, help the blog owner out by publicising the article you’ve just written. Link to it from your website and your social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook. Go back to the blog post from time to time in order to respond to any comments that readers have left. Keep the dialogue going as long as possible for everyone’s benefit.

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.

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.