Business Blogging Best Practices for 2020
Blogging is a major part of most businesses nowadays—and for good reason. Companies that blog regularly end up receiving 55 percent more visitors to their sites compared to companies that don’t. That means you are actively hurting your business if you haven’t set up your own blog.
However, establishing the blog isn’t the end of the road. If you do have a blog that you neglect for three or four months at a time, then you are still not doing your company any favors. That is why you need to make sure that you are following these guidelines on how to run a successful business blog in 2020.
Post 2 to 4 Articles Each Week
There seems to be a lot of confusion within the industry surrounding how often someone should publish a new blog post. Some companies are satisfied with posting one or two articles a month, whereas other companies post upwards of 20 a month. So, the question is, how often should you be posting content on your blog?
The truth is that this answer depends on a few different factors. Namely, your industry and the goal of the content that you are posting. For example, if you are putting content on your blog in order to improve your organic traffic numbers, then you are going to need to publish more frequently than you would if you were solely going for increased brand awareness.
But, generally speaking, it is recommended that you post an average of between two and four articles each week. This should be enough to get the significant impact that you are looking for without taking up too many resources.
Keep Post Length Between 1250 and 2500 Words
It is assumed that if you are starting a company blog, then you are going to be writing about topics that you frequently deal with, which makes you an expert. So don’t be afraid to really get in there and flex your expertise in your blog posts.
A lot of businesses make the mistake of trying to keep everything short and sweet in order to make it easier for them to meet the recommended number of posts per month. Unfortunately, if you end up publishing content that is too short, then it is not going to perform very well on the internet search engines.
You need to be creating long-form blog content with some impressive value, which takes time. That is why it is recommended that every one of your blog posts should have a length between 1250 and 2500 words. This will not only help with your internet search engine rankings but will also help to get you more online shares as well.
Make Headlines Between 14 and 17 Words
It is not just the length of the entire blog post that matters. The length of the headline itself also has a big influence on how well the post performs. In fact, longer headlines have been repeatedly shown to get more social media shares than short ones.
While you don’t necessarily want your headlines to be entire novels, you do want to use enough words to be able to paint a picture for your audience of what to expect in the rest of the blog post. In order to get the best results possible, it is recommended that you create headlines that use somewhere between 14 and 17 words.
You can enhance the performance of your blog posts even further by making sure to include certain elements within your headlines. For example, if you make your headline a question, then you are more likely to get a higher amount of online shares.
It is also good generally good practice to include numbers in headlines. By doing all of these things, you should be able to create some headlines for your blog posts that are able to significantly increase the performance of your articles.
Include Images in Every Post
This is probably one of the most inconsistent aspects of the various company blogs out there. You can visit one business blog and see that they only include one header image in each post but then go to a different blog and have half of the entire post being made up of images. So who is right in this scenario? Chances are that neither of these blogs is using image distribution properly.
But for most of you, that isn’t very helpful. If you’re looking for a specific amount, the general consensus is one image per 150 words.
Neil Patel
When it comes to company blog posts, it is generally recommended that you include one image for every 200 words. So if someone is only writing a 500-word blog post, then they can easily get away with using a header image and then another image somewhere in the middle of their post. However, if they are writing something that is going to be 2,000 words long, then a single header image and body text image would not be nearly enough. It is best to write the entire blog post first, then take a look at how many words it is and include images on an as-needed basis based on the 200-word rule.
Place Multiple CTAs Throughout Blog Post
The worst thing that you can do is create a high-quality blog post and then forget to add a call-to-action at the end. All this does is give visitors a good piece of content to read that they will then absorb into their mind and move on with their day. This is because there is nothing there to tell them to click on other similar articles or other pages on the company website.
That is why you need to make sure that you are giving them as much opportunity to do so as possible, which you can do by including not just one but at least two different CTAs throughout the blog post. You should ideally be putting one near the end of the intro and then another one at the very end of the post.
By following these best practices, you will be able to make your company blog something that is actually going to help your business. To get help setting up or running your company blog, contact Radcrafters today.