The blog. A lot of companies have them, not a lot of companies make use of them. Often, the blog will lay, unutilised and unappreciated, gathering digital dust and failing to add value to a website.

A lot of the time, we’ve found that this is either A) because businesses are busy and don’t have the time to create content and upload regularly, or, B) people simply don’t know where to start, and so they shy away from the blog.

This shouldn’t be the case! You are an expert in your field- it’s your voice that website users want to hear when they land on your page, and consequently, writing a blog post now and again is a brilliant way to impart your knowledge (and your brand) onto your users.

Why should I take time out of my busy schedule to blog?

User experience is the main reason for blogging. Your customers (and potential customers) come to you for advice, knowledge, inspiration – and your blog is where they should find these things. If your blog is interesting enough then you’re likely to build a regular audience of people coming back time and time again to read what you have to say. In many cases, we have found that a website’s top landing page is, in fact, a popular blog piece – so putting the time into creating interesting content really is worth it!

Another important reason for blogging is for Search Engine Optimisation. In order to keep your website ranking well with search engines, you need to be producing fresh, new, unique content regularly, so that the search engines have something to crawl, and so that they can see you are regularly trying to improve the user experience on your website.

How should I start blogging?

If you’re staring at a blank page, and you have no idea what to write about, then you’re rushing things. Don’t plunge straight into the deep end and try to start writing a blog straight away, instead start by thinking of all the different things that your business is good at.

Write a list of all of the different things that you know about, and then turn this list into a list of blog topics. You can also add in things like events you’ve put on, trade shows that you’ve been to, fun things that have happened in the office – anything positive that will show off your brand and culture to your customers.

Once you’ve got a good list, draw up a blogging timetable – and try to make time to blog once a week. Blogging regularly like this will help you to build up an audience who know that you’ll be posting a lot and thus, will visit your website a lot to read your latest offering.

When you write, try to just write. This sounds silly, but often people can suffer from writer’s block because they think too much about word choices etc, when instead they should just throw everything down that they want to say as a first draft, and then re-draft the blog into something publishable.

Be friendly and warm when you write, try to be relatable – there’s nothing worse than reading something that sounds like it came out of the mouth of a robot!

It’s also really useful to add hyperlinks into your blog. For example, if you are talking about a product that you sell, link to its product page. This means that if the reader is interested in finding out more, they can just click on the link rather than faffing about trying to find the product in your main navigation.

Finally, practice, practice, practice! Blogging comes naturally to some people, but to many it takes work and the best way to get over your fears of knowing where to start, is to just keep practicing!

Whilst many of our clients do start to enjoy the blogging process, for some of them, there simply isn’t enough time. That’s why in our SEO package we offer a high quality, highly relevant blog post a month, written to compliment the client’s site and engage their users.