A blog for your business can be the easiest and most cost-efficient way to strengthen your brand and connect with your customers. Apart from driving traffic to your website, it can help boost sales and even establish your business as an authority. 

However, one of the biggest challenges for any business that is about to start blogging is developing unique and consistent content. Here are our top tips for creating original content for your business:

1. Plan your content

Time constraints and lack of ideas are two of the biggest reasons businesses are unable to produce high-quality blog posts. Fortunately, it’s something that can be addressed with a little bit of planning. 

Start by creating a schedule. When do you want to publish a new blog post? Do you want to run a new article twice a week? More often? Remember, consistency is key. Think about whether your schedule is feasible given how busy you are. 

From here, do the research. Get to know your audience and find out what kind of topics they’re actually interested in. Keep in mind that blogging for business means you’re writing for your audience. 

2. Develop your ideas

Make sure you’re offering readers valuable content. This attracts their attention, keeps them engaged, and develops your site’s authority on the subject matter and industry. 

At this point, you should already have at least a basic idea of what your audience wants to read and learn more about. Jot down possible ideas and see how you can branch out from these topics to expand your options.

For example, if you’re running an online jewelry store and want to create content about it, don’t limit yourself to talking about your own designs and stocks. You can write about jewelry trends for the new season; style ideas on how to wear a particular piece; how to recognize quality jewelry, and other similar topics.

3. Create a content calendar

After you’ve determined how often you want to publish new content and gathered your ideas, you can now plot actual articles in your content calendar. 

Set actual dates you plan to publish each article, following your predetermined frequency. This will help make it easier for you to track what has already been written and what has been published. A clearly laid out content calendar also helps to ensure that you stick to your publishing schedule. 

4. Start drafting

Be strategic when drafting your blog posts. Creating content for content’s sake can have little value. Here are a few tips:

• Pay attention to your opening, including the title or headline and opening paragraph. A lot of online readers engage with a particular post based solely on whether the title is interesting enough. In fact, according to Copyblogger, only 20% of your audience will read your entire post, while 80% will read the headline. Getting them to click your article depends on whether the title can capture their attention and pique their interest.
• Use keywords. A great tool to use for this is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Incorporating keywords into your post can help drive traffic to your blog and expand your audience. 
• Write in simple, easy to understand words and short sentences to keep your audience engaged. No one wants to read through a wall of text. Create an article with concise, well written sentences, and that is well researched. 

The above tips should get you started. You can read more about how to define a clear strategy for your blog posts here. 

One final thing…

There’s no shame in exploring additional tools or resources to help you with content production. Some businesses, particularly those that want to focus on running the business itself, don’t necessarily have the time to write their own posts. As an option, you can consider hiring an internal writer who can help you with this task or outsource content production, which is actually something we at LeadsPanda can help you with. 

Also, consider automating some of the operational tasks behind blogging. For example, if you’re using WordPress to publish your blog, you can actually schedule content in advance to ensure that your latest content is being published in a timely manner. 

So that’s it! If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer any of them. Just leave a comment below.