Need To Raise Funds For a Project!

I've had a couple of discussions with clients this week about what makes a good blog post on their business blogs. No matter your subject matter, your blog posts should be of good quality and not written hastily. You want to post once a day if possible, or perhaps only every business day. Posting more often is ok if you have time, but sometimes with frequent posting, the quality is difficult to maintain.

Each blog post I make on my sites takes me between 30 and 90 minutes as I craft it pretty carefully. There is nothing wrong with adding a post about something that is on your mind or an article that you found, but you should try to write so that each post:

--> is of real interest to your site visitors
--> has no spelling/grammar errors
--> follows SEO principles e.g. contains lots of (relevant) keywords and uses anchor text links
--> is well-written and easy to read
--> cross-links to a relevant product or info page on your site
--> uses one or more relevant labels

One client suggested to me that SEO should be the main focus of their blog, but I disagreed. Yes, blogging can provide a huge boost to your SEO efforts, BUT first and foremost, you should be providing your site visitors and potential customers with good content and a useful service. You want to build up your subscriber base and you can't do that if your posts are written primarily for the search engines.

Always post content that is timely, relevant and helpful to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, post articles about exotic destinations. If you provide an online car auction site, post links to consumer surveys comparing the safety features of various vehicle makes and models. To get more ideas for blog posts, consider your customer phone and email inquiries. What topics do they need more information about before purchasing? Look at your site stats too. What pages are people visiting the most or viewing the longest? That should tell you what content people are finding most useful on your site. Consider asking your visitors and staff for blog post suggestions. I bet your customer service staff could give you loads of ideas for new content.

Make good use of post labelling too. Blog labels are primarily to enable blog readers to navigate your blog more easily and find specific content they are looking for. Your blog should have a label for each of the main topics you write about. Each label creates a new page on your site that is about a specific topic and collates all your blog posts about this topic in one place. Not only is this good for usability, but the search engines consider your site a more relevant match for the topic because generally the URL and page content are very keyword-focused.

Happy blogging!