1. Set Goals

It won’t hurt your company if your blog is filled with random announcements and ramblings about, say, middle relief needs for the Texas Rangers. In fact, it’d still probably even help give your company a human face. But you can get a lot more bang for your buck if you plan ahead and tailor your blog around specific topics—especially ones that customers and clients will be eager to read about, and ones you’re pushing as part of your search engine optimization and Internet marketing strategy.

This matters for two reasons:

1. Customers will be much more likely to check in repeatedly if they know they’ll find relevant, compelling topics — instead of what you had for lunch each day last week.

2. Furthermore, if you know in advance in which search results you’re trying to gain a foothold, you can work relevant terms and links into the posts week after week after week.

2. Set a schedule

While even your most devoted customers and clients probably aren’t going to be setting alarms reminding themselves to check in on your company’s blog, regularity still matters to your customers and clients. Your most faithful readers are probably people who are simply happy to know that there will be new relevant, intuitive, useful information for them every week or month. But if you, say, produce a flurry of posts one month, and then none for the next three, customers and clients will probably stop checking in.

Furthermore, if you set a schedule well in advance, you can time blog posts with the releases of new products and services, boosting your overall marketing and promotional efforts. For example, if your company is releasing a new line of snow tires, write a series of blog posts explaining the benefits and uses of said snow tires.

3. Don’t Treat Readers Like Algorithms

It may sound obvious, but in the age of SEO and search engine marketing, there’s simply nothing worse than a blog that was clearly written for Google, Bing or Yahoo. In other words, you wouldn’t talk to your customers as if they were an algorithm (Hi Joe! Can I interest you in some snow tires, winter tires, snow-proof tires, winter-proof tires, tires for snow, or winterized tires?).

So even if the maximum benefit you get from your blog is the way it boosts your search engine rankings (among other valuable benefits), the maximum risk comes from how it could turn off your customers. In other words, if your search engine blogging strategy works well enough to get them through the door only to see them turn around and quickly leave again (never to return, most likely), the SEO blogging was nothing more than time and money wasted.

Focus on your customer first—good, knowledgeable writing backed by intuitive, compelling ideas that truly seeks to be of value to customers will prove to be far more valuable than something written for a search engine. If a customer really likes something you wrote, there’s a good chance they’ll link to it on their own blog, which boosts search rankings more than keyword shenanigans would anyway.

Furthermore, don’t neglect to ask questions and encourage response and engagement from your customers. Even if you’ve never gotten a single comment from customers, don’t assume they aren’t reading.

4. Make blogging collaborative

Blogging is a great way to incorporate your entire team and boost participation. Giving employees a chance to add their two cents engages them in the company-wide mission (rather than only their small role within it), and lets them add value in a visible way.

Furthermore, team blogging engages your customers beyond just the brand level. It humanizes your brand, making it much more likely that your customers will develop that critical level of respect and affection that can develop into a long-term business relationship.

Of course, we’d be more than happy to do the heavy lifting behind this for you.  Contact one of our Dallas corporate blogging specialists for more information.