Top Tips for Blogging

Blogs are a terrific format for a business website but the blogging word is constantly changing, and it can be very overwhelming to try and keep up with the features, opportunities and challenges of blogging. That’s why it’s important to have quick access to some simple blogging tips that can help you along the way.

It’s important to choose blog software and stick to it, learn how to use it and work with it in the best way you can. That means it’s important to look at a few different variations and see what will work better for you and your business. Many WAHM/MWWAH’s use the free blog sites like blogspot.com which do not require hosting or domain name as you get your username URL e.g. exampleblog.blogspot.com. It’s up to the individual about the choice, some we bbuilder’s may have inbuilt blogs also. Whatever you feel will work for you is the main thing you have to feel comfortable with what you are working with.

Select a topic I realise many of you want to blog about quite a few things however try and stick to a topic to target your demographic and audience more effectively (random ramblings about being a mum in business, keep it strictly business related with topics around your kind of business etc). Make sure your content is based around this blog topic or you may lose some of your target audience by drifting in different tangents.

Blogs also work quite well as a branding tool for a website. However, in order to achieve your business goals you need blog traffic. If you’re looking to increase traffic there are a few tactics we suggest you try.

Title tags - Your post title has two purposes. 1 Attract attention and 2 motivate people to read your blog post. It’s also there to help drive traffic to your blog. It’s there to be indexed by the search engines. That means you want to have keywords in your post’s title as well. Consider doing a bit of keyword search to find common search phrases before you post to your blog. The more search engine friendly, the more traffic you will drive to your blog.

Comments – That’s right… Commenting on other industry blogs is a great way to source traffic!! Register and comment on their blog posts with your blogs URL as your web address and people will surely check it out!

Tag your posts - Tags are a way to label your content. Tagging essentially helps people find your content. It makes your posts more user friendly and helps drive traffic to specific categories and posts.

Social networking - Link to posts on your social networking profile pages, fan pages and through your posts. Include a teaser or ask a question to motivate social network users to click through to your blog post. On Facebook I use Linked in which is a great way to auto post to your page. As soon as I post on my blog it automatically posts the details on my page. I also obtain followers through the linked in platform.

Social bookmarking - Sites like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites are great for driving traffic. The mistake some users make is to bookmark every single post on their blog. Instead, submit the top posts only.

Invite guest bloggers - Guest bloggers bring with them their own audience. They help add credibility to your website and in turn, they drive traffic. Additionally, guest bloggers are sure to promote their posts on your site through social media and their own blog. This means added traffic.

Use your analytics - Find out what posts are most popular. Look to see where your readers are coming from and explore how they find your site. Then repeat those posts and marketing measures. For example, if you find that most of your traffic is coming from social networking activities and they really like your weekly quotes, then you know you can capitalize on that.

It’s important to focus on creating quality rather than quantity. No one wants to read a daily blog if all that is written in it is boring, tedious and unrelated to the main blog topic. The more you can relate to your audience the better and the more value you have to your audience. If people like what they read on your blog they will link to you and promote your blog.