Once you’ve taken the important step to set up a blog on your company website, it’s important to keep it up to date to maximise its benefits. But it’s not always easy to think of things to say. Here are my top tips for generating new content for your business blog.
- Talk to your customers – the more feedback you can get from your customers about their experiences, good and bad, the more food for thought you’ll have for your blog. You don’t need to name them, but for example if they tell you that all other suppliers have been slow to respond to them and your team communicates really well, you could do a blog on the importance of good communication.
- Subscriptions – in my experience, there is an online newsletter for just about everything these days! Whether it’s a news and current affairs update, an industry specific round-up or a bulletin about your personal hobbies, reading new content on a variety of topics can help to spark new ideas.
- Customer case studies – your blog should give readers a rounded overview of your company and why you’re different from your competition. They should reflect your personality as a business and what better way to do this than by giving your customers the air time to talk about their experiences of you. You can do this by letting them write their own if they have time, or by doing a 5 minute interview over the phone with them so you can write it for them. Getting their approval before it goes live, of course.
- Research – sometimes we have an idea of what we want to say, but we don’t have the facts to back it up. Or we want to ground our thoughts in some real statistics. A session of online research can help you gather all the information you need. Sometimes it can take a bit longer, but often you can find a useful snippet in no time and the result is a more interesting and useful blog.
- Guest writers – some blogs you may have seen will invite guest writers to feature on their blog. This gives your readers a slightly different experience with a fresh view and a new voice. Also, other people will always be able to think of new things to say based on their own experiences.
Organise your blog posts
Once you have considered what you want to say, it’s good to lay out your ideas in a content plan – find out how to create one here. This will help to make sure your content offers readers a good amount of variety and includes a mix of informative pieces, opinion posts, and more light hearted, or personal articles. It’s this combination of pieces, posted consistently, that will ensure your blog is a hit with your readers.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help – hire a content copywriter
Of course, thinking of what to say is only half of the battle. Then you need to find the time to put pen to paper or more likely fingers to keys! If you know just what to say and you need help writing it, or maybe you need help coming up with some of the ideas too – maybe an external blog writer can help? Hiring a freelance copywriter to manage the whole process, means you can have a consistently populated business blog without the hassle. They can bring ideas to the table as well as write posts so that sound like they have been written by you.
If you would love a company blog that is updated regularly with useful and engaging content, please feel free to drop me a message at helen@blogwrite.co.uk, or use my contact form, to see if I can help.
