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Business Blogging Mistake: Falling Into a Content Rut

Business Blogging Mistake: Falling Into a Content Rut

Take a quick look back over your last two months’ blog posts and tell me what you see.

Hopefully, you see a variety of topics (something for each of your customer personas), presented in a number of engaging formats, and addressing concerns from both new visitors to your blog and potential customers making buying decisions.

If not, you may be making one of the 15 most common business blogging mistakes: Failing to offer a variety of content.

Here are 6 ways you can vary your blog content to keep things fresh and reach a variety of personality types among your target audience.

1. Vary the subjects of your business blog posts

Unless your company has a very limited offering in a tiny niche market, you should be able to create blog posts about a range of subjects, all still tied into your primary objectives (and tied into offers you can use to capture online leads).

For example, if your company provides inventory management services, your blog topics could include specific inventory management challenges that impact individual industries. After all, retail clothing stores have different needs than grocery stores who have different needs than auto repair shops who have different needs than manufacturing facilities, even if all of those needs involve inventory management.

B2C companies can also vary their topics by writing about things that may not be directly related to their products, but that are of interest to their customers. An outdoors and sporting goods company may not be directly involved in booking adventure travel, but their customers may be interested in that topic, making blog posts about it a good fit to further draw in readers.

 

2. Vary the intensity of your business blog posts

Not all of your readers will have the same level of familiarity with your company, your industry and the topics you write about. Make some posts introductory in nature, while diving deeper into detail and more advanced information in others.

This variety will help you keep readers as they advance their own knowledge, or move further through the sales funnel toward a buying decision, while also continuing to bring in new readers who are just beginning their buying (or learning) journey.

3. Vary the writing format of your business blog posts

Not every blog post should read like a 5-paragraph essay. Change up the format you use. Some ideas:

  • How-to/instructional

  • Top 10 lists

  • Newsjacking (connect current news/events with your topics)

  • Curated content

  • SlideShare presentation

  • Q&A or interview

  • Statistics review

  • Opinion and thought leadership

  • Fun or entertaining

  • Case study or human interest story

You’ll find templates to get you started on the first five formats on this list here: 5 Ways to Write a Blog.

 

4. Vary the length of your business blog posts

While sources say the best length for a business blog post is in the 1,500- to 3,000-word range, individual businesses may want to make adjustments based on their editorial calendar and frequency of posting. Every post should be long enough to be useful, but don’t fill a post with extraneous information for the sole purpose of adding words.

In the post linked above, Lean Labs suggests that businesses who publish daily or several times a week can blend in shorter posts to complement the more in-depth material published other days, and I agree.

5. Vary the perspective or authors of your business blog posts

Remember that within your customer personas you likely have target audiences who look at your business, industry and topics from a variety of standpoints. CFOs may be looking at cost-comparisons and ROI on investment in services, while the COO is considering how quickly staff can learn to use your solution and how easily it can be scaled to cover multiple locations. Address both of those perspectives in different blog posts.

You can also introduce new perspectives to your business blog by inviting guest authors—others within your organization, satisfied customers, industry analysts, other business bloggers—to contribute posts. When you reach outside your company, you also open up opportunities to grow your blog’s readership as your guest blogger promotes their post.

6. Offer business blog posts that are more than text

Whether it is images that support the text or a blog post built entirely around a video or infographic, providing visual content is a great way to spice up your blog posts. And it may make them more likely to be shared as well.

Here are few statistics on visuals to consider: (Source)

  • Articles with an image once every 75-100 words get double the number of social shares.

  • Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3 times more  than other content.

  • 43% of people want to see more video content from marketers.

Business blogs, and individual business blog posts, aren’t a one-size-fits-all undertaking. Your industry, your topics and your target audience(s) may make certain types of blog posts more effective than others, and your staff and content creation resources may push your posts in certain directions. But don’t let those tendencies push you into complacency.

Shake up your business blog by doing something different in your next post, then check out the other common business blogging mistakes listed in our ebook and move to the quick fixes for correcting them as well.

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