There are thousands upon thousands of blogs out there. Some are great and others are spammy attempts at getting keyword rich content in as many places as possible on the web. While there are blogs that discuss pretty much any topic imaginable all blogs fall into two main categories, business blogs and hobby blogs. There really aren’t too many rules for hobby blogs, but if you own or operate a blog for business there are certain best practices that need to be followed.
Here are four tips to maintain a professional-looking business blog:
Remain Active
This is an area in which many businesses struggle. They understand the value and importance of a business blog so they set one up, write a few posts, and then let it sit inactive for months at a time. This simply isn’t acceptable. If you include a link to your blog content from your website, website visitors are going to click over to it. If your last post was from four months prior, that doesn’t look good. Visitors may get the impression that you are lazy or that you aren’t organized and don’t have your priorities in order. Four months is a long time. Depending on your industry, it could be very possible that your last post discusses now irrelevant information.
A business blog should be a main priority. If you can’t dedicate any time to it, don’t start one.
Monitor Comments
If you are going to allow comments on your blog posts, you need to actively monitor them. Never allow all comments to go through because you will be left with a bunch of spam comments that include links to irrelevant sites and content that isn’t even related to the post. In many cases, it will be pure gibberish. The blog comments contribute to the post quality overall. Blog visitors will take note of the fact that you don’t take the time to monitor the comments, weed out the bad ones, and respond to the good ones.
Pay for It
Never start a business blog on a free platform like Blogger or the free version of WordPress for two reasons. First, it will look like thousands of other blogs out there. Do you really want your business blog to look like Ron’s Car Fanatic blog? Second, you will have limited control. Paying to host a blog on your own site is well worth the cost.
Take Design Seriously
Businesses are judged by the look of their web properties. If your website or blog looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1999 or is hard to navigate, it leaves the visitor with a poor impression of your business. You may have great website content that is well optimized and a great product or service, but if the website looks outdated you will appear to be outdated as well. It’s important to invest in a website re-design every few years just to keep things fresh and professional looking.