Blogging has grown tremendously over the last 10 years and it is now seen as a necessity to online marketing.  Blogging started out as a simple experimentation – exactly the same as most of the popular digital trends today, and it exploded.  By having a business blog is most likely the easiest way to start engaging with potential clients using social media. Some will even go as far as saying that blogging started the social media craze even though it has been far longer around than blogs.

Should every business have a blog? This question will most likely have a mix of answers, but I strongly believe that if your company has something to contribute of value that others will find interesting, definitely yes. An excellent blog marketing strategy is about delivering useful and interesting content to your readers.  Blogging with no value is just adding noise to an already busy social media sphere.  This noise can hurt your company’s marketing campaigns.

Identify your blog readers

So what should you be blogging about so that it doesn’t come through as “noise”? Firstly, identify who you want to reach with your blogging efforts. Who will be reading your blog posts? Do you want them to find your writing interesting and valuable? This will be your targeted audience.  This could be employees, potential clients, shareholders or maybe a particular market niche.

Once you have identified your targeted audience, research on what they are interested in reading that is aligned to any of the services or products that you offer.  Blogging should never focus directly on advertising, but should provide valuable information. To give you an example, if you are a WordPress developer/designer, you may blog about answers on other people’s questions that they have about their WordPress website or blog.

Having an optimized blogging plan is an important step before you start with your blog marketing.  This will insure that you connect with your targeted market that will find your blog posts interesting and you can develop a strong readership to your blog that will keep on growing. By building a readership to your blog, you are building a readership to your business.