Promote Your Blog Posts with Ethical SEO Guide

A blog is a traffic magnet. Social media traffic, referral traffic and, yes, organic traffic.

On average, marketers and content writers spend more than three hours on a single blog post.

Organic traffic is also the source of most of our customers.

All this happens because we took the time to optimize our blog posts.

If you don’t want to miss out on organic traffic and potential customers coming through this channel, read on.

Optimize your blog posts for SERPs in a few simple steps:

1. Find the right keywords

Great SEO isn’t just a matter of ranking. It’s a matter of ranking for the right (read: profitable for your business) keywords.
How do you find these keywords, though?
Always focus on these three rules of thumb

• They’re long-tail keywords
• They match user intent
• They match your business goals

Here’s why you need all three. Long-tail keywords aren’t just easier to rank for. They are also easier to match with user intent (as they are more specific) and with business goals. 

My process is this simple: if a keyword doesn’t pass all three questions it’s booted. We move on. 

2. Use those keywords

Now that you’ve found the perfect keywords, let’s put them to good use. 
Very important: good use doesn’t mean stuffing your content with them. This won’t get you ranking but it will get you penalized. 
Here’s an example of what keyword stuffing looks like:

Image via Quora

How often is too often? Well, the ‘law’ is unclear on that.
The rule I follow is keeping the keyword density below 3% and ideally below 2%.
However, you don’t have to abuse those keywords in order to rank for them. You just have to stick them in the right places:

• Title
• URL
• First paragraph (or first 100 words)
• Last paragraph (or last 100 words)
• At least one subtitle
• Alt image tags
• Meta description
• Sprinkled reasonably throughout your content

Rule of thumb here: just write naturally. Don’t force it. If your human readers like it, so will Google bots.
Additionally:

• Use plenty of synonyms to your main keyword(s)
• Use LSI keywords – a quick guide here

3. Optimize every asset

Don’t just optimize your written content or text body. Use your keyword (and its variations) in:

• Image tags
• Meta description
• Video tags
• Social media captions

4. Promote your optimized content

Submitting it to Google isn’t enough. We already know the biggest Catch-22 of organic traffic: the most popular websites/posts, get ranked higher and, thus, get even more organic traffic.
One other thing that’s relevant to your ranking is the number of traffic sources. So help your content become the most popular kid on the block. Here’s how:

• Share it on social media. Not just once. Organic reach isn’t your friend, so make sure you share it multiple times at different times of day to reach a bigger chunk of your audience.
• Tag media outlets/influencers you mentioned. Did you link to anyone’s website in your post (you should! See below)? Email them or tag them on social media. They are likely to share your post.
• Turn it into an ad. Even a smidge of a budget on Facebook ads can boost your posts popularity immensely. Try it out.
• Email it to your list

5. Use best linking practices

There are two major categories of links that help your blog posts grow (except for the backlinks you earn, of course)

• Outbound links – links to other (preferably high-authority) websites. This proves that you’ve done your research and checked out trustworthy sources to back up your claims.
• Inbound links – links to other blog posts or web pages of yours. This helps Google better understand your content. It also helps your pages/posts rank higher. An inbound link from one of your top-performing posts to other posts helps the latter gain more traction in SERPs.

6. Be useful

I’ve said this countless times: don’t write for search engines. You’re not in business with them. Write for humans, for their pain points and needs. They are the ones you want to be in business with.
Make sure your content is neatly organized, easy to read (bullet points and headlines help a lot!) and, above all, useful.

If humans, find your content useful, they will read it, share it and come back to your blog for more. This is earned traffic aka the best kind of traffic. The kind that Google rewards with better rankings.

Wrapping things up

The most important thing about blog SEO is to never forget about its purpose. No, that’s not traffic. Traffic doesn’t pay the bills.
It’s getting customers.

Write for them. Choose keywords that match their needs and pains and write in a way that is compelling and truly helpful to them. Not to you, not to search engines.

Not sure how to achieve all that? We are! Take a look at our copy writing and content writing services. We create content that BOTH human readers and Google love. And we’d be happy to create some for your business, too.

Get Better On-Page SEO Impact on Your Business Websites

With so many businesses being launched everyday, how can you ensure that yours stands out? If your business has a good, first page ranking in search engine results, what can you do to stay on top?
  
Studies show that on desktops, the top-ranking page in Google search results has a conversion rate of almost 35%. And on mobile devices, its conversion rate is almost 32%. This shows how important it is to improve your search engine ranking and boost your site’s visibility.

SEO helps you optimize your website so that more users are able to find you on the internet. 61% of marketers say that SEO is a top priority when it comes to inbound marketing. This means that the competition is getting tougher. You need to build your brand’s presence online by taking steps to improve search engine rankings. 

Optimization of keywords, meta tags, title tags, and URLs are some of the common ways to improve a website’s SEO. But with changes and updates in how search engines rank a website, you need more than that. That is where on-page and off-page SEO come in. And this post is going to focus on on-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves optimizing a web page through internal organization, while off-page SEO refers to external configurations. 

Here are some of the best ways you can improve your on-page SEO:

1. Maintaining Website Speed

47% of customers believe that it shouldn’t take longer than 2 seconds for a web page to load. And even a second of delay can reduce your pageviews by 11%, and your conversions by 7%. A fast loading website is the key to an engaged audience. On the other hand, a slow-loading page makes people impatient, which leads to a higher bounce rate. 

For Google, a website that loads faster gets a higher ranking in search engines. Google’s PageSpeed Insights helps you determine the total time taken for your website to load. Once you know what’s slowing you down, you can take the necessary steps to improve your website speed.

2. Using AMP

Mobiles account for over 50% of website traffic, and this number is only going to increase in the coming years. For this, it is important that websites load almost as fast on mobiles as they do on desktops. This is what led to the creation of Accelerated Mobile Pages or AMP.

AMP is nothing but a coding standard that helps websites load instantly on mobile phones. When you do a simple Google search, all the top-ranking results have an AMP tag, especially when it comes to news stories. You’ll be able to see a little lightning bolt symbol on top. 

Although it is not owned by Google, it has the company’s support. This basically means that when it comes to indexing websites, Google’s search engine algorithm will consider AMP. With AMP, websites have seen a 20% increase in sales conversions.

3. Responsive Site

A responsive site means that the site has been designed to cater to the design needs of different devices. In 2015, Google announced that mobile-friendliness of a website will be an important criteria in search engine rankings.

Mobile search optimization is important for strong on-page SEO since there are more people using smartphones. At least 90% of people in the U.S. use a smartphone. People use smartphones for searches to buy things, to read, and to access social media. 

Desktop websites are heavy and cannot load as well on mobiles and tablets. To improve user experience, businesses need a responsive design so that desktop, mobile, and tablet users all have the same experience. The idea is to ensure that the website understands which device is in use, and then adapts to it.

4. Creating Engaging Content

Nothing beats good content when it comes to search engine rankings. Original and relevant content gets a better search ranking. 

For Google to crawl a website, the content needs to be at least 500 words. In fact, the average length of articles on the first page of Google ranking is 1,890 words. Long-form content of over 1,000 words tends to get more likes and shares. This means more visibility in search engines.

Make sure that the content is written in a simple and concise way. People should be able to understand what you’re saying so they can stay engaged, otherwise they will simply bounce away. 

Using Long-tail Keywords for Optimizing Content

Keyword optimization is important when it comes to SEO but with long-tail keywords, your website will get more diverse and relevant traffic. There will be plenty of websites which may be using same or similar generic keywords but if you want to target your niche, you need to stand out.

A long-tail keyword may not be used very often in search engines but they lead to a target relevant audience. Long-tail keywords are valuable and more specific to a customer’s needs.

Run a competitors search and figure out all good keywords that your competitor is targeting then start from there to get some traction. There could be 100’s of long tail keywords to monitor for which your website might be ranking but that are unknown to you. A ranking tracking tool like ProRankTracker can be a great help in this area.

5. Use of Internal Links

Internal links connect a web page with another page on the same website. If your web page contains 2-3 internal links, then it helps the search engine determine the relationship between the pages. A search engine crawler then gets an idea what your website is all about and then ranks your site accordingly.

That’s why internal links are important for good on-page SEO. They help a user navigate your website smoothly. And even for a search engine crawler, if there are no internal links, those web pages are left out of indexing and they simply don’t exist. A good website should have links to other relevant internal pages spread out evenly throughout the website.

6. Use of HTTPs

In 2014, Google made HTTPS encryption for URLs a ranking signal. HTTPS or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure is basically a website security certificate known as the SSL or Secure Socket Layer certificate.

This makes any kind of data breach difficult by making any external sharing of data almost impossible. HTTPS makes a website trusted by Google. It is very important for ecommerce and banking websites especially when more people are making online transactions.

It is believed that HTTPS enabled sites get a very minor boost in search engine rankings, but it is still important for on-page SEO, especially since Chrome puts a “not secure” mark on non-HTTPS sites. Seeing this mark could alarm many of your visitors, who could end up leaving soon after landing on your site. This will increase your bounce rate, affecting your search ranking. 

7. Use of Structured Data

Structured data is nothing but organized data. In SEO, structured data means a markup on the web page that provides more details about its content. It helps search engines to go through your website and understand what it is about.

Here’s how it will look in search results pages. People will be able to see details such as the star rating, number of reviews, price, stock status, etc.

Search engines like Google have a markup tool that can help you with structured data for your website for improving on-page SEO. Structured data means enhanced search results with more images, videos, GIFs and other styling elements. This increases click-through rates and drives traffic.

Conclusion 

Google, the undisputed market leader in search engines, has made a lot of changes in its search algorithm in the last few years. With these new factors for website ranking such as good loading speed, AMP, HTTPS, internal links, structured data, and engaging content, SEO has become all the more technical. 

Boosting on-page SEO through these techniques is time-consuming, and can be a problem for someone who doesn’t understand these technicalities. If you know more ways to improve on-page SEO, let us know in the comments below.

Do SEO to Generate Business Leads from your Website

A website parked on the internet, without SEO and some-one constantly tweaking the SEO, will never be found in online searches and will never generate an organic business lead.

Organic leads that convert into sales, are certainly more cost effective for your business than leads obtained through PPC (Pay per Click) marketing. The key purpose of SEO is to attract organic leads to your website, rather than the websites of your competition.

The best way to ensure organic leads come to your business, rather than going to one of your competitors, is to rank higher than them in search engine query results, for your chosen keywords. This can only be achieved, if you incorporate quality SEO work, into your website strategy.

It is important to rank higher than your competition because the top few search results delivered up by search engines, generally gain most of the traffic for the search term, and any result that is not displayed on the first page of delivered search results, rarely see much traffic.

Like most business owners, you invest in a website so that your target audience can search and find you, when needing the products or services you provide. To achieve visibility, each of your web pages (and sometimes sub-pages), needs to be optimized to be found by search engines.

SEO Tips - DillipKumarBarik.Blogspot.com

You may have read that SEO is also about branding and marketing, and whilst it may contribute somewhat in these areas, the key role of SEO is to ensure your website meets all the ever-changing requirements of the search engines, whose role it is to provide searchers with the most relevant results, for the search term from the businesses that they (in their own way) determine, are more important and have a level of authority.

To enable your website to become a lead generation machine, you must make sure you match your customers goals, with those of your business.
This is easier said than done, and SEO is how you do it. Here is the process;

• Firstly, you must research and select the most relevant keywords that potential customers use when searching for the products or services offered by your business.
• Secondly, you need to choose which of these keywords, you will focus on, when attempting to rank your business higher, in future search results.
• Thirdly, you then need to optimize your website for these keywords, and
• Fourthly, begin the process of incorporating the keywords into your content, as appropriate and without resorting to keyword stuffing.

It also pays to understand, that multiple keywords that are searched for less often, sometimes generate more leads for your business from your website, than one heavily searched for keyword.

Patience is the key with SEO. You need to commit to ongoing SEO work, and allow time for the work to move your business, up the search rankings. You can further help the process of improving search engine rankings, by frequently posting additional content to your website. Such content needs to be quality content, the fresher and more unique, the better.

Unique Visitors Targeted before Search Engines In SEO Campaigns

In any Search Engine Optimization and Marketing campaign through content marketing, we are all familiar with the argument that content should be written for website visitors rather than search engines.

But how many of us abide by that?

As a copywriter myself, I can remember hundreds of times I have been confronted with clients who want keyword-targeted content that doesn’t do much of anything to consider the reader and largely SEO-focused. Unfortunately, this approach is more common than most of us would like to believe.

Search engines and readers have both become much more discerning in recent years, but this doesn’t mean that crappy, SEO-obsessed content doesn’t still exist. And to some extent, we can’t blame the people who create it.

While the warnings about Google penalties and algorithm updates that penalize crappy content are everywhere, ranking in Google is harder right now than it’s ever been. Instead of investing in quality copy and understanding that SEO is a long-game thing, many people get a little desperate and write their content for SEO first and users second, thinking this will produce faster results.

Although this approach is a little backward, it’s easy to see how people can get tied up in it.

Today, we’re going to talk about why it’s so critical that your users always come before your SEO, and how to use this to produce better content marketing. Read on.

Difference Between SEO-Focused and User-Targeted Content

Sometimes, I think people who put out search engine-focused content think they’re getting away with something. Like nobody can tell that they’re writing for search engines rather than people. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true.

While the best content considers both users and search engines, material that focuses too completely on one or the other is very obvious. Here are some of the primary differences between SEO-focused and user-targeted content.

SEO-Focused Content

• Targets keywords more than value.

• Isn’t cohesive.

• Doesn’t offer relevant resources and back-up material.

• Often features low-quality writing.

• Is created on a “fast and furious” basis, without the attention to detail, accuracy, or quality that it deserves.

User-Targeted Content

• Takes longer to produce.

• Includes keywords, but relies on intent rather than literal interpretation of keyword phrases.

• Clusters around topics rather than terms.

• Offers outbound links and links to other internal information that will help the reader understand the topic more deeply.

• Features high-quality writing.

• Is grammatically-correct, with intense attention to detail and accuracy.

With these fundamental differences in mind, you can see how there’s no mistaking SEO-focused vs. user-targeted content. The two are entirely different animals and they’re not interchangeable. 

Smart Reasons to Focus on Readers First

We’ve always centered our content strategy around our readers. We’ve never paid for a PPC ad and our content is created without a thought to a sales funnel. While this may seem backward to some people, it’s worked like gangbusters for us.

Today, we beat every single one of our major competitors on Google by a ranking margin of five percent. While we certainly target keywords in our posts, the keyword comes after the value of the post. As in: we write a post, and then, once it’s drafted and complete, we identify a keyword to rank for. In other words, it’s always users-first around here.

Here are five reasons this approach makes a whole lot of sense:

1. Trends Are More Important To People Than They Are To Search Engines

One of the things we write about most often is digital marketing trends: how Google is changing its algorithm, what Facebook is releasing in the way of live-streaming, etc. While our readers are generally really interested in these topics, search engines often aren’t until much later.

If we were to look at these topics from a keywords perspective, for example, we’d have a tough time coming up with anything because the search terms surrounding those topics would be virtually unheard-of to Google and similar search engines.

While we might get a kick-back later, when search engines caught on to those search terms, it’s most important in these situations to serve readers first. In addition to positioning us as a leader in the industry, it’s also a great way to give our readers what they want, when they want it.

2. Some Topics are Just Too Competitive

If we approached our content from a keyword-only basis, we probably wouldn’t write a lot of the content we do, since the keyword phrases we’d be targeting would immediately seem too competitive. That’s never stopped us from creating posts, though, since we write them for our readers first, and search engines second.

When you seek to provide value above all else, you’ll typically succeed at creating a unique, widely-read piece that pleases both your readers and the search engines. This holds much more weight than a piece that’s been crafted solely to fulfill the needs of Google.

3. SEO Isn’t the Only Way

While SEO is indeed critical to a good content marketing strategy, it’s important to remember Google isn’t the only way people find your content. So if you’re only creating content for Google, you’re in big trouble. In most businesses, people come to content through a mixture of social media, links their friends and family share, media, paid promotions, and e-mail messages.

Because of this, it’s critical to create content that this diverse audience will find valuable when they stumble upon it. As such, focusing on relevant, informative, exciting material is key, because it will please all your readers rather than just the ones who find it through a Google search.

4. Sometimes, You’re Already Ranking Well

If you’ve done a good job of creating targeted, relevant content that speaks directly to your readers, you might not need to focus on SEO because you’re already ranking at the top of Google’s SERPs. When this happens, you basically “own a keyword phrase,” as Content Marketing Institute points out, so there’s no point in continuing to hammer your content for SEO.

In these cases, the best thing you can do is create quality, relevant material that appeals to your audience. In addition to helping you maintain your spot at the top of the SERPs, it will also go a long way toward helping you earn new rankings down the road.

5. Some High-Value Topics Have Low Search Value

Again, if you looked at your content creation from a SEO-only standpoint, you’d breeze right by many important topics because they might have low SEO or search value. That doesn’t mean these topics don’t deserve attention, though.

In many cases, topics with low search value stand out as critical building blocks in your content strategy. While they might not be the ultimate evergreen pieces that draw all the people to your material, they could easily be a critical reinforcing beam for your existing content strategy, or an essential back-up source for a larger piece you’ll write down the road.

Leave these seemingly unimportant topics out of the fray, and you’ll risk creating a lopsided content marketing approach.

The Case for Always Putting Your Readers First

Content marketing is a dynamic field, to be sure, and there’s lots to look at in any given moment. In such a busy industry, it’s understandable that some people lose track of what’s important and get caught up obsessing over SEO, instead. The one thing you can’t afford to lose focus of, however, is your reader.

While SEO trends come and go, your readers are the foundation that gives you a business to work with. Lose them, and you’ll lose the entire structure of your company. When you think of it this way, it starts to make a lot of sense to focus on your readers first and SEO second.

While it’s important to understand the basics of good SEO and include things like keyword phrases and meta content in your material, it’s more critical to understand what your readers want and need, and develop an approach to give it to them.

When you do this, you can create a successful content marketing approach that sustains your brand now and in the future.

Please not forget to your valuable suggestions, which encourages me to gather and write more tips about the SEO or Search Engine Marketing process.

Wish u all Happy New Year - 2017 !!

Happy New Year - 2017 @ Dillip Kumar Barik Blog

Existing Content Optimization Techniques

Now days Content Optimization is a main weapon of SEO Campaign for a Business Website. No matter how many SEO tools, tricks and best practices you implement, you won’t attain significant results without content incorporated into strategy.

Content Optimization is a highly successful and widely used modality of driving traffic, educating consumers, escalating sales and pushing a site higher in the Search Engine Result Pages. As we all know, however, the space is becoming more competitive by the day as more and more brands generate content.

Just because a piece of content was created months or years ago doesn’t mean it no longer holds value; a little modernization is all that is often needed. In order to determine if a particular post needs to be updated, start first by looking at similar content to see if more recent publications are trumping yours.

Once you have compiled your existing contents, you can begin reworking these pieces to drive a new wave of results.

The first step in this process is to determine if there have been any new happenings or recent developments on your topic since the original piece was produced; you want your content to be as up-to-date and accurate as possible.

Next, it’s wise to conduct keyword research again. If your content is more than a year old, the best words and phrases to leverage may have changed. A few years back, long-tailed keywords did not have the power they do today. Mobile and voice-to-text search have both greatly altered the way people present queries; this needs to be taken into consideration when formulating your keyword strategy. Also, be sure to optimize your publication for semantic search by including companion keywords, utilizing synonyms and variations of words, and writing in your audience’s organic language.

With older pieces of content, there is a good chance that many of the links that were once present are now broken; remove any of these defunct portals. Take things further by strengthening your internal linking through incorporating hyperlinks to other relevant content that holds authority. Additionally, you will want to bolster the number of links to respected websites. High authority sites are those such as reputable news sources, educational sites and other trusted and high-ranking pages. Search engines take into consideration these types of links, giving your content credit as a more trustworthy destination.

Once you have updated your content to include more current information, relevant and high-ranking keywords, and plenty of authoritative internal and external links, it is time to promote it all over again. Publish the piece on various social media websites, send out the update to your email subscribers, push it to the homepage of your webpage; use all the tricks in your marketing toolkit. People won’t be interested in your newly revamped content if they don’t know that it exists.

Not all content needs to be deeply researched and created from scratch. You can save tons of time and energy by simply resurrecting old content with new information and allowing it to work its magic all over again. The key is to make sure that you abide by today’s best practices, incorporate the most cutting edge information possible, and to be sure that your offerings are useful by offering up direct answers to some of the most common questions your audience has. Don’t let your old brilliant ideas become irrelevant. Re-purposed content is an SEO goldmine.

Business Blog Updating Tips to get Unique Visitors

Most businesses are beginning to see the value in having a company blog, but it can be difficult to decide what to do with it once you make one.

A good business blog doesn’t focus so much on selling, but instead on providing information and making your customers want to do business with you. If you do it right, your blog can help you become a leader in your industry; you should post relevant, up-and-coming information that shows customers your knowledge, while also giving them ideas.

Content should be fresh, original and exciting. If your customers take the time to read your blog, they want to walk away feeling like they gained something – not like they were suckered into buying.

Here’s a list of ideas to help inform, excite and engage your readers:

Information:

1. Write how-to articles. These types of posts will give your readers instructions – and you can even include screenshots or images – on how to do something related to your business. After reading articles like this, customers will view you as a knowledgeable, authoritative source.

2. Create “tips and tricks” lists. You could offer lists with benefits for doing something or lists of things to avoid. These can help readers understand your industry better.

3. Write an FAQ post. If you take the time to answer the questions all of your customers are asking, it shows you acknowledge them and want to find solutions. It will also help save customers’ time.

4. Pay attention to the news. You want your blog to feel up-to-date, so incorporating current events is beneficial. You could talk about how relevant events are affecting your customers and/or your business.

5. Talk about common myths. If you can come up with a list of common myths about a product or an aspect of your business, shed light on them and demystify them, readers might become more understanding and more likely to do business with you in the future.

6. Be practical. Readers will like it if your posts directly relate to them. Write posts related to the seasons, time of year or specific holidays. This will make your company more relatable to your customers’ everyday lives.

7. Partake in a friendly debate. You could do a “Point/Counterpoint” post with someone in your field who disagrees with you. Readers will see that you are knowledgeable, passionate and willing to show them all sides of an issue.

Excite

8. Record an interview. Any form of multimedia can make your blog more exciting for readers. You could turn an interview with an expert in your field into a podcast, or you could even record yourself giving useful tips.

9. Make a step-by-step tutorial. Whether you make a video or a stream of images, readers will be excited if you show them how to do something. Everyone likes learning new things, and it’s always easier with multimedia.

10. Be creative. Don’t be afraid to use humor in your blog, because customers enjoy when a business is down-to-earth and genuine. Try making a music video for your company or some sort of funny mashup with your employees. It’ll show your enthusiasm for your industry and your company!

11. Make a slideshow of pictures. You can use platforms like Flickr to post slideshows with pictures from recent company events. Images always liven up a blog, and if customers find themselves in a picture, they’ll be even more excited.

12. Write “sneak peek” posts. Give your readers inside glances at what you’re planning for the coming year, whether it’s a new location or product. You can use any form of multimedia to do this, but it’ll help you generate interest.

13. Create infographics. Any post filled with graphics and facts will be a hit on social networks and get a lot of shares. This is a great way to get exposure on different sites.

Engage

14. Create polls. If you develop surveys and polls to give your audience, it shows you value their opinion and want them to be a part of your company. Make sure you publish the results of the polls in a blog post or infographic!

15. Interview your customers. If you write an interview post or create a video with your most loyal customers sharing testimonials and success stories, readers will feel more connected with your business.

16. Start fun contests. Make sure you occasionally reward your customers for reading your blog. You could create contests that get them more involved, such as sending in funny pictures that relate to your business and then picking the winner.

17. Make staff profiles. By including images and descriptions for each of your employees, readers can feel more connected to you and your staff.

18. Talk about your charity work. If your business volunteers in the community, write a blog post about your recent experiences – and include pictures and videos of the event. Show that you’re engaged with the community around you.

19. Share customer feedback. Regardless of if you have comment cards, surveys or email forms, create a post with highlights from the suggestions you received from customers. This shows you’re listening and being open with them.

20. Offer readers something. Give your blog subscribers and readers something to thank them for their commitment to you. It could be a giveaway that you only post on the blog, or a sneak peak at a new product or service.

Using a variety of informative, exciting and engaging posts will help you keep readers interested in your business blog. With so many ways to create original content, neither you or your readers should get bored with your blog!

Have additional ideas for spicing up a blog? Share them with your fellow bloggers in the Comments section.

Blogging Inspiration, Top Blogging Ideas for Business Blogs

Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.

WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!

Use your Colleagues

Brainstorms can be a brilliant way to come up with interesting blog ideas. Don’t limit yourself to asking only the PR or SEO teams though, invite people from across your business to contribute to a brainstorming session. They might not have the skills needed to write good content, but they may have insights and opinions that will help you generate great ideas.

Speak to your partners, colleagues, and employees, and listen to them to decide what would best suit the needs of your company. Then, come up with something you can write about which takes this on board.

You might even want to talk to some of your regular and trusted customers, to find out what they’re interested in, as there’s a good chance other potential customers will share those same interests.

Remember why you’re blogging. In the case of a corporate blog it’s usually to generate business – so put your audience first and write for them, not for your own interests. You might be delighted to finally have a platform to rave about your travels, but your corporate clients won’t care.

One key consideration is to make sure everything you write is both useful and interesting. That’s the best way to maintain a high standard for your blog.

Become a Serial Killer

Serializing your blog posts can be a great way of producing killer copy over the medium term, rather than putting all of your eggs in one basket. By producing a series of posts on the same topic, you increase the apparent relevance of your site for that subject – and give your readers some other pages to click onto.

Serial articles can help keep people interested in your blog and encourage them to return for more useful content on a relevant subject. You could consider writing a series of how-to articles, or reviews of products, industry publications, or even Twitter accounts from within your sector.

At its best, this approach can encourage readers to come back for the next instalment, creating a steady flow of visits. So, if you’re relying on serial posts to get people back to your site, you might want to stick to a regular schedule for maximum effect.

One caveat – don’t flog a subject to death. There is nothing worse than reading a series of posts which do nothing but re-iterate the same ideas over and over again. If you have nothing new to say on a topic then it’s time to find something new to write about.

Please Read.......

Simple enough to be summed up in a single word, ‘read’ is one of the best pieces of advice that can be given to any writer. The more you read other people’s blogs – even if they’re not relevant to your industry – the more you’ll understand what makes for engaging content.

You also need to read people’s blog comments and take on board what they’re saying, both on your blog and other people’s. This will help you to understand which sort of posts are good and which aren’t.

Once you’ve gained this understanding, as well as gathering some new ideas, the trick is to turn them into something that is not only engaging and entertaining, but which also meets your marketing or lead-generation needs.

Remember, it’s not just new ideas that you can pick up by reading other blogs – you might also improve your grammar and style along the way.

Invite Guest Bloggers

Consider asking an industry influencer if they’d like to contribute to your corporate blog. They are likely to be flattered, so it could be good for networking, and they will publicize it to all their Twitter followers and online circle, which can lead to some new traffic for your blog.

Just one word of warning: agree how you’ll edit their copy in advance. People can be very protective of their work and may not be happy if you’ve gone through it with a red pen. Edit their work lightly and send it back to them for approval before publishing.

Break the Rules.......

Finally, a fallback option is to go out and break all the known rules about corporate blogging. But, if you take this option, on your own head be it! Every so often you will find a corporate blog that has almost nothing to do with the company that publishes it, but focuses on something like environmental sustainability or charity work instead.

You might also see ‘corporate’ blogs that are purely for entertainment purposes, filled with jokes, or comic strips, or pictures of cats. When you’re this far outside of the box, there are very few hard and fast rules left to break, but get it right and you could give your brand a huge boost in positive perception as a result.

The only caveat to this is that it’s always wise to have plenty of plain text along with any images, info-graphics, videos, and so on. If you can get some relevant language into it then so much the better, even if it’s just ‘After a hard day working on our new landlords’ insurance document, we’ve been relaxing with some polecats. Enjoy!’

That way, even if you’re giving your visitors something fun to look at, you’re still delivering the search-visible text content that will help to get you into the search engine results.

However, I wouldn’t recommend this as a good way to write a corporate blog. Nine times out of 10 it’s not a clever quirky marketing strategy, it’s down to ego, and it brings little benefit to the business.

Five golden rules.......

Ultimately, there are just five things you need to consider when writing corporate blogs.

Your posts need to be:

-- Relevant -- Timely -- Frequent -- Personable -- Useful

These are the golden rules for great blog content so never publish anything without considering those first.

Top Blogging Tips......

If you’re still struggling for blog ideas, try some of these top tips:

1. Look at current trends, extrapolate them, and make a prediction for the future of your industry.
2. Do an introduction to 10 of the best up-and-coming bloggers in your field.
3. Find a current topic of debate and express your own, new, different view on the issue.
4. Make a list of common myths and misconceptions about your industry and then debunk them.
5. Satirise a well-known personality – it can be someone inside or outside your industry.
6. Look at a big brand, and analyse both their good and bad points – show where they’re using best practise techniques and where they’re making mistakes.
7. Find a recent piece from a high-level personality in your industry, disagree with it, and prove them and their opinions wrong.
8. Do a case study of something that went wrong in your business. Analyse the mistakes and explain how you fixed them.
9. Break some news about your company, e.g. revealing a new product.
10. Write a list of the vital web tools and software people in your industry can’t do without.
11. Compare the old and new ways of conducting your business.
12. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business e.g. “How Steve Jobs Would’ve Done SEO” or “The Bruce Lee Approach to Marketing”.
13. Go to a trade fair or industry event and report on it.
14. Do a comparison of your national market to markets abroad.
15. Review a book which deals with your industry – particularly if it contains some interesting outside the box thinking.
16. Find out about something new for your industry – a tool, a website, a method etc. – and write about it.
17. Identify industry leaders in your area and ask them to do a guest post.
18. Write a code of business ethics for your industry.
19. Conduct an interview with a prominent or rising industry figure and write it up.
20. Check Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Quora to find out what’s most popular right now, and what questions people are seeking answers to. Then provide the information they want on your blog.