Running a blog on your site has many benefits:- for your business, for your web site and for your prospects – which in turn all help with your profits. Recent Hubspot study showed that Active Business Blogs draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic than Non-Bloggers. So here are some of the benefits and ideas for some blog posts.

Benefits:

• newly updated content is a great love of search engines. Your site will be rewarded by having it crawled more frequently and you will also get a better search engine position

• blog posts can also be optimised for the search engines. This can bring a whole new set of traffic to your site from long tail keyword phrases.

• a well written and useful blog will bring regular visitors to your site as they want to see what you have written and what you have got to say

• blogs are also good for building a community on your site, it’s an opportunity to engage and communicate with customers and readers.

Blog Post Ideas:

• lists are a very popular type of blog post. People can scan through without having to read intensively. They are to the point with succinct information.

• Solve a problem – find out what problems your customers really do need to solve. These ‘how to’ style posts can really bring in the traffic.

• A review post – writing a review of a product or a book. Ideally the review would be of a product that you supply. You could ask a customer to write the review for you.

• Analyse current trends in your marketplace – this will help build your reputation as an industry expert.

• A guest post from another blogger – another writing style can be refreshing for the post, and you will gain from the traffic that could come from the other blogger’s site.

• Run a contest to give a free product to a reader – depending on what the prize is, this could go viral.

• Create a list of the stories in your business niche

There are plenty of topics for posts on a blog. If you don’t feel very creative, visit other business blogs in your niche and even outside of your niche for ideas. A great place to start is www.bizsugar.com which is a portal for blogs of internet marketers. These guys know what they are doing and there is much food for thought that can be converted to topics in your niche.

Not a very good writer? You can always find someone who is and outsource your business blogging to a local company or a freelance blogger.

Photo by Mike Licht.