According to Demand Metric, 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers stated that business blogging is a part of their content marketing strategy.

To run a successful business blog that generates traffic and leads, you need to have a strategic approach. You must consistently publish high-quality, relevant content that focuses on the right pain points — based on proper keyword research and target audience analysis. 

Join us as we explore the benefits of business blogging and discuss best practices for starting and running a successful business blog.

What is business blogging?

Business blogging is the process of creating and publishing content on your company’s website. It typically involves different types of content — articles, infographics, webinars — covering tips, news, and insights related to your product/service or the industry your business operates in.

The main goals of business blogging are to increase organic traffic and attract new customers and clients. The best way to do that is to regularly publish high-quality content that answers the burning questions that prevent your target audience from getting a good night’s sleep. 

Business blogging is not rocket science. Almost anyone can write and publish an article. Doing it in a way that will attract and convert your ideal customers — well, that requires a fair bit of SEO knowledge, research, planning, and consistency. 

Let’s discuss what it takes to launch a successful business blog.

How to start blogging for your business

Getting started with business blogging can be a daunting task, especially if you’re new to the blogging world. Let’s dive into the process step-by-step.

1. Define your target audience

The success of your blog depends on gaining a deep understanding of your target audience. It’s crucial to find their interests, challenges, goals, and objections to sale —- so you can craft content that will resonate with them. 

If you’ve been on the market for a while, you should already know who your ideal buyer personas are.

For example, a blog targeted at decision-makers in a manufacturing industry will typically have a more serious tone of voice than a blog that wants to attract people who resell clothes as a side hustle. 

Make sure you nail down who your target audience is before making any major content plans. 

2. Decide what to write about

Deciding what to write about is easy if you know your target audience. 

You can find inspiration on different channels:

• Social media: Check LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other social channels to learn more about your audience. If you don’t have any followers, take a look at your main competitor’s social channels. You can also use a tool like Sparktoro to better understand the content, brands, and influencers your audience engages with.
• Online discussion forums: Don’t neglect the power of discussion forums, such as Quora, Reddit, and industry blogs in your niche — your audience is there and they are sharing their rants, issues, and concerns. 
• Videos and podcasts: Search for relevant podcasts and YouTube/TikTok channels to find popular topics in your niche. 
• Customer surveys: Conduct surveys and collect feedback directly from customers — but be ready to take out your wallet if you want to receive quality feedback.

Ideally, the content you produce will be associated with the products/services you’re offering in some shape or form. 

We recommend starting with educational topics to build trust with your audience and then start producing content that is more service or product-oriented.

If you look at our services, you’ll see they are directly connected to the categories on our blog.

However, we’re not directly promoting and selling those services to our target audience in every single post. It is a mix of content that offers general marketing advice (like the post you are reading right now) and posts that directly promote our services. 

You will also find a fair bit of research pieces as Google loves original content!

Remember to narrow the focus of the content to the areas you’re an expert in. If you do not have anything unique to say on a given topic, you’re bound to just regurgitate information that’s already out there. 

3. Conduct keyword research

Once you have identified the buyer personas you want to target, it’s time to develop a smart content strategy that aligns with their interests and needs. 

If you plan to create thought leadership content that you will push to your existing audience on social media, you can skip this step. 

However, if your goal is to attract more organic visitors, keyword research will be the foundation of your content strategy and editorial calendar. It will provide insights into:

• what are the most popular phrases your audience is typing into Google
• what is the search intent behind those keywords
• how hard it is to rank for specific keywords.

Focusing on the topics you find interesting from time to time is perfectly fine. However, to get any value out of business blogging, you have to write about topics people are actively searching for.

4. Create a content strategy

A precisely defined content strategy will help create high-quality content that engages your audience and drives traffic to your blog. Before you start crafting your content strategy, make sure you have accurately conducted the steps explained above.

The strategy is a plan that outlines the way you’ll use content to achieve your business goals.

Your content strategy doesn’t have to be 20 pages long, outlining every minor action you plan to take. Instead, include:

• goals you want to achieve with your content
• people you are targeting (target personas)  
• types of content you’ll be creating
• who will be involved in the process (internal team; freelancers; marketing agency; mixed approach)
• rough publishing frequency (how much content you plan to publish weekly/monthly)
• channels you’ll use to promote that content
• metrics you’ll use to track the progress (should be in line with your goals).

Having a proper content strategy in place will ensure your blog is consistent and provides value to your audience.

5. Create a content calendar

The main purpose of having a content calendar is to stay organized and accountable. A content calendar will help you stay consistent, regardless of whether you’re a one-man band or command a whole content production team.

There’s no special rule you should follow when forming a content calendar. You can find different templates online which can be adjusted to your needs — or you can simply create it in a spreadsheet like we do.

The usual items you should look to have on your editorial calendar are:

• Due date (when the post should be finished and/or published)
• Status of the post (we use TO DO, IN PROGRESS, DONE, PUBLISHED, ON HOLD, SCRAPPED)
• The name of the author (or person responsible for getting the content piece done)
• Content type (research report, infographic, ultimate guide, opinion piece, company news…)
• Working title
• Main keywords (1-3) you want to optimize the post for (which you can leave empty if the post is not targeting a specific keyword)
• Notes (to mark down any important notes the team needs to know).

You can, of course, add additional fields based on how your content production process is set up. We try to keep it clean and simple, without wasting time on information that nobody is going to use anyway.

If you’re not starting your blog from scratch, we also recommend you conduct a content audit before you finalize your editorial calendar. The audit will help you identify content that needs to be updated, merged, or even deleted.

6. Set up your content development process

Consistently producing quality content is harder than you think. If running a business blog is not in your job description, there’s always going to be more important matters to attend to. 

A well thought-out content development process will help you streamline work, ensure consistency in style and voice, and help you stay compliant with your editorial calendar.

The first step is to decide who’ll be creating your content — will you have enough resources to handle everything internally or will you need to outsource some work to freelancers and marketing agencies? 

Once you determine that, you can jump to the next steps:

1. Assign roles and responsibilities: To achieve a seamless content creation process you’ll need marketers, writers, designers, and editors. Ensure a clear definition of each role and its responsibilities.
2. Define visual guidelines: This includes selecting a color palette, typography (font size and spacing), and image style (will you use stock images, illustrations, GIFs, etc.).
3. Define writing guidelines: Define your blog’s tone, voice, formatting, and grammatical guidelines.

If you have a weekly publishing schedule, and want to handle everything internally, you’ll have to assemble a content production team.

7. Promote your content

If you publish high-quality posts with actionable advice that are easy to consume and are properly optimized for both readers and search engines, you will eventually get some traffic. But probably nothing to write home about. 

To see ROI from business blogging in a reasonable timeframe, you have to actively promote the content you publish. 

To attract more eyeballs faster, there are many different means of promotion:

• Link building: Aside from helping to increase the ranking of your post and website in general, link building can also help you generate valuable referral traffic.
• Social media: Share your content on your social channels, which are hopefully the same channels your target audience is using.
• Newsletter: This is literally why newsletters exist. It’s a no-brainer.
• Paid advertising: Promote your content via Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other paid advertising platforms. This is often worth considering only for more promotional posts.
• Influencer outreach: Reach out to influencers relevant to your niche and ask them to share your content with their audience. This approach works much better if your content offers unique insights.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Over time, you might find even more ways to promote your blog and reach more readers.  

Insider tips for running a successful business blog

Let’s explore some additional tips for running a successful blog that will help you build a loyal following and achieve your blogging goals.

Focus on your readers and ways to provide value

Avoid the temptation of using your blog to only discuss your products and services. Instead, focus on your readers’ needs, preferences, and pain points, and craft educational content around that.

There’s lots of good content out there. Listing a few tips and calling it a day will not work. You need to look for ways to provide additional value with your content.

A couple of years ago we noticed how our audience (more concrete, people interested in link building) struggles with crafting quality guest post pitches. 

We surveyed 80+ editors about the most important elements a quality guest post pitch should have. We then structured the collected data into a long-form post enriched with eye-catchy infographics that feature useful statistics and editors’ quotes. 

And that’s a great example of how you can provide additional value.

Write attention-grabbing headlines

On average, 8 out of 10 people read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 read the rest. This emphasizes the importance of crafting a headline that makes the reader want to explore the content further.

The headline of an article or any other content form should always do two things: 

1. Inform the reader what the article is about 
2. Give a compelling reason for the reader to continue reading.

If you’re not feeling creative enough to come up with compelling headlines, seek a little help from tools such as CoSchedule Headline Studio, Impact title generator, and other similar ones.

Optimize for search

There are some key points to consider when optimizing your blog content for search engines:

• Optimize meta tags: Meta title and meta description must provide an accurate description of your content and should include a targeted keyword(s).
• Optimize images: Use descriptive alt tags for custom images.
• Use internal linking: Improve navigation and help search engines understand the structure of your website by linking to other relevant content from your blog.
• Aim for readability: Use subheadings, short paragraphs, and bullet point lists, and put important facts in bold to make your content easier to digest.

Optimizing your content will drive more traffic to your blog and build trust and credibility.

Prioritize quality

In the era of AI for content creation, you may want to fall into the temptation of using AI-generated content to scale up your blog. However, this will only hurt your blog’s reputation and credibility. More than ever before, it’s time to prioritize quality over quantity. 

If you wonder what makes quality content, here’s a brief list:

• a proper structure that is easy to follow
• actionable tips — not just what to do but how to do it as well
• custom images that simplify complicated concepts
• relevant and up-to-date data and statistics
• properly cited sources.

Make sure that your content is well-researched, accurate, and engaging. It will help you build a loyal reader base that trusts your content and keeps coming back for more. 

Be consistent

Business blogging isn’t a short-term endeavor. To see results, you must be consistent. 

Adhere to the content calendar you’ve crafted, as it will help you stay organized and accountable. According to Marketing Insider Group, 2-4 posts per week is ideal. From our personal experience as a content marketing agency, 2-3 well-researched posts a month are perfectly fine to start with.

When you manage to do that consistently, you can start thinking about increasing the volume.

Use clear CTAs (Calls to Action)

Call To Action (CTAs) should be an essential part of the content creation process. Clear and compelling CTAs allow you to:

• Increase engagement: CTAs encourage the readers to take action, like sharing the post or leaving a comment, which leads to increased engagement.
• Drive conversions: Strong CTAs can lead to an increased number of sign-ups, downloads, increased sales, and other actions you want to achieve.
• Measure success: By tracking the number of clicks and conversions, you’ll be able to measure the success of your blog and make the necessary adjustments.

The formula for crafting successful CTAs — be creative, use strong verbs and persuasive words and make the CTAs visible! To find out more about CTAs, we recommend checking out our awesome blog about setting up effective CTAs. 

Regularly analyze & update underperforming content

Always keep an eye on your blog post performance — it is a crucial step for achieving long-term success. 

There are many different content analysis tools out there. We recommend starting with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Google provides free tools for tracking the performance of your whole website, as well as specific pages. The wide range of features it offers enables you to make data-backed decisions related to your content strategy.

Once or twice a year, review how your posts are performing. Those that are not attracting many clicks and impressions or have a low bounce rate may need more love. You can try to improve them by:

• adding internal links from other pages on your website
• updating any outdated information and broken links
• adding rich content like infographics, custom images, or videos
• writing more compelling SEO titles and meta descriptions
• double-checking if the post hits the right search intent (and updating the post accordingly).

Need help with business blogging?

Business blogging is an effective way to connect with your audience, establish authority in your industry, and drive traffic to your website. However, creating and running a quality blog is not a simple task as it takes time and effort.

 According to Orbit Media, 

• 52% of bloggers are struggling with finding time to create and promote their content
• 46% are struggling with attracting visitors
• 39% are struggling with creating high-quality content
• 33% find it hard to be consistent.

If you have lost faith in achieving enviable business blogging results too, just check how we helped our clients — Crosslist and JetFinder. Still not convinced? Schedule a call and give us a chance to discuss your content needs and challenges.