Somewhere along the way, you heard the message loud and clear from web experts: a business blog was the thing to have. Based on this advice, you added one to your company website. But now, your business blog is dead and you do not know how to revive it. It once had the potential to bring you leads. Instead, it’s betraying you with a museum of articles you never wanted to write and would never want to read. How do you revive a dead business blog? Or should you just cut your losses and move on?
Understand one thing about business blogs: done right, they can be an incredibly powerful tool to promote and grow your business. Reviving a dead business blog is definitely worth it.
How to Revive a Dead Business Blog
Assessing the Basics
Online, things move pretty fast. The great advice you once got about business blogging has now changed. The way search engines operate today means that the strategies of yesterday are out the window. Let’s move on.
Ask yourself these quick questions:
• Is your blog visually appealing and user-friendly?
• Are your blog posts organized by categories?
• Do you have broken links or images?
• Do you have social sharing icons or calls to action in your posts?
If any of these points need work, roll up your sleeves. Let’s take a closer look at these questions.
Visual Appeal
Blogs need to be visually appealing, clean, and draw readers into your content. Are you adding images or infographics to your post? If not, it is time. Would you browse online for a home without seeing pictures? Just like online home shoppers, blog visitors love pictures, so provide the customer with what they want.
Categories
Let’s continue the home search metaphor. Home shoppers want to know the function of rooms in a prospective home, so home advertisements categorize spaces. Likewise, you need to categorize your posts. Help people find the information they seek more quickly and impress them with your organization. You earn brownie points for running a tight ship.
Broken Links and Images
Do you have broken links and images? Not only are broken links and images annoying, but they also harm your credibility, your SEO ranking, and may cause visitors to leave before they digest your message. As silly as it may seem, fixing broken links and images needs to be a priority. Optimize your images so they don’t take a long time to load. Slow-loading images are especially a problem when it comes to smartphones. You can read more on how to optimize images here.
Social Sharing Icons
Finally, if people have to copy and paste the URL of your article to share in social media, then you are not doing them any favors. Go ahead and request social sharing icons for your blog posts. People trust (and hire) businesses that their friends recommend on social media, so this is your opportunity to get warm leads. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to share your content with social share options below each post.
This is only the first step if you want to revive a dead business blog. There are other things you can do to really rev up your efforts in this area, and we’ll examine them in future posts. If you want to know more, subscribe to our blog.