【How to write a successful business blog】How to create a blog for a startup, introducing industry exclusive knowledge and know-how!
Blogs are one of the most important mediums that play a role in corporate web marketing.
However, problems such as “I don’t know what to write on a blog”, “I want to write a blog, but it takes too much effort” are common in startups that are too busy to handle everything.
Today, we will introduce the process of writing a company’s blog article effortlessly, that introduces the respective industry knowledge and know-how, making you wonder why you didn’t start before!
Step 1: Understand why you’re writing the blog
Step 2: How to find an idea
Step 3: Set your target audience
Step 4: Try writing an article
・Think of the points you want to introduce
・Easy to understand by anyone
・To create a user friendly article — Hyperlink, Heading and Table of Content, Upload a photo
Step 5: How to choose a title
・Decide your SEO keyword
・Tips on choosing an attractive title
Step 6: What to not forget after you publish the blog
Summary
Step1: Understand why you’re writing the blog
For corporate blogs, it is far more profitable for the company to confirm the original purpose of writing the blog, and creating an article that expresses it, rather than just writing what has come to mind spontaneously.
In most cases, the purpose of a company’s continuous blog updates is to connect them to conversions.
The format of conversion will vary depending on the business, such as acquiring new inquiries and contracts, connecting to visits of their stores, purchasing products on their EC sites, etc., but in any case it is safe to say that the main goal of all firms is to create the biggest marginal profit from it.
And in order to achieve the objective of “getting conversions through blogs”, SEO settings for blog articles become very important.
SEO is an abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization” and it signifies the process of maximizing the chances of your content to be shown higher in a search engine, by optimizing the keywords linked to your website/blog.
If SEO measures are implemented properly, blog articles will be displayed at the top = more people will read the article → more chances for conversion.
Step 2: How to find an idea
Some ideas we recommend to small/mid companies and startups are:
- Information and expertise in your specialized industries
- Know-hows that you can share with the public
The important thing here is to think from the reader’s point of view.
The topics you usually search for when you have questions or interests at work, could be great material to be written about as a blog..
Also, what you normally do in-house may be unexpectedly in demand.
One thing to keep in mind is that it’s best to avoid reports of any kind (such as post-event reports) as they are unilateral topics and can be tedious to the reader.
Step 3: Set your target audience
As mentioned above, let’s check “to whom” we will write in order to create sentences that are conscious of the reader. By setting the target audience, it’ll be easier to create content that would be fitting for the target..
The people you cannot miss, are “people who are interested in the topic of the article”. In addition, being aware of “potential customers of your company’s services and products” would help when connecting to conversions.
Step 4: Try writing an article
We have listed the following important points when writing an article:
Think of the points you want to introduce
Before writing an article, list the points you want to convey, so that you can create an organized draft, rather than writing from the top of your head. Not to mention, you will most definitely require a shorter time to write by being aware of what to write.
Easy to understand by anyone
Nobody wants to read sentences with many difficult words or unknown terms. Be sure to explain technical terms and person’s names when you mention them.
If it’s too complicated to explain in an article, you can create another article to explain it, or post a link to another site that provides information regarding the difficult term.
To create a user friendly article
Make the articles as easy to read as possible by utilizing the functions of the blog site. Here are some examples using Hatena Blog:
Hyperlink
Ability to embed links in text or articles themselves. Inserting the links of other articles also has a synergistic effect.
Heading and Table of Content
Function to insert heading/table of content. Having a table of content at the beginning helps readers know in advance what this article is about and what they are looking for.
Upload a Photo
Ability to insert photos between paragraphs. Readers tend to prefer rich contents with pictures.
Step 5: Choose a Title
A blog’s article is the most important aspect when managing articles
The search engines would show the blogs using the title, so:
- The title should take SEO into consideration
- Point out the information that the readers want, and make the title appealing to read
Choose the SEO keyword
The recommendation here is to utilize Google trends. Google Trends allows you to see trends in keywords being searched by the Google search engine, and even compare multiple words by time period or region.
For example, when deciding on the keywords for this article, I used Google Trends to compare the three words “corporate blog,” “business blog,” and “professional blog.”
You can see that “business blog” is the one searched the most out of the three.
Since it doesn’t make sense to take SEO measures for unsearched words, we chose “business blog” as an SEO keyword this time.
Similarly, this article is targeted at small businesses, venture businesses, startups, etc., so we compared these two keywords: “venture blog” and “startup blog”.
The top result was “startup blog”, but we tried to actually search Google for each keyword.
What we found was this;
There were many similar articles as this one in the search results for “startup blog”.
In the search results for “venture blog”, there were also many blogs about venture capital which did not relate to our topic.
So, instead of paying attention to a niche keyword such as “venture blog”, we decided to use ‘startup blog’ as the SEO keyword.
Like in this method, analyze the keywords with Google Trends and add a title with many effective keywords.
Tips on choosing an attractive title
In a nutshell, all you have to do is construct your SEO keywords while taking the user’s psychology into consideration.
The user (reader) should have doubts about something, which led him to search for the keyword in a search engine. A title that includes the SEO keyword that reflects the information the reader wants to know will likely be effective.
Taking the title of this article as an example,
[【How to write a successful business blog】How to create a blog for a startup, introducing industry exclusive knowledge and know-how! ]
It includes the SEO keywords “venture blog” and “startup”, and also adds information that readers may want to know by keywords “exclusive knowledge” and “know-how”.
Also, using “【 】” at the beginning to make keywords stand out visually, is another way to attract readers.
Step 6: What to not forget after you publish the blog
To spill the bean,, it’s to share your article on other websites such as your homepage or SNS after publishing!
We have said that SEO is important so far, but let’s try to further increase reach with the sharing function of SNS. For example, you can share the article on your own Facebook → shared by your followers → reach even more people.
Summary
The important points you shouldn’t miss when writing blogs are:
- Purpose (Connect to conversions)
- Target audience (Who you’re writing to)
- Method (SEO measures)
It is necessary to organize these 3 points in advance, and write the article according to them..
And with the techniques I’ve introduced above, even busy startups can begin writing blog posts and boost conversions!
It may take some time to complete an article while you’re still not used to it, but as you write numerous articles, you will get used to it and become able to see the pattern of writing, allowing you to shorten the required time.
By all means, do try out this process introduced in the article!
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