These days, most business owners are aware of the numerous advantages of blogging.

They know that blogging creates multiple opportunities to rank well in Google .

They know a company blog is the best way to show off their company’s expertise.

They know that blog content is brilliant for engaging their social media audience.

They know that it’s a great source of leads – and ultimately more sales. According to research from Hubspot , businesses that produce 16 blog posts or more see more than four times as much traffic as those who published 0-4 blogs.

They’re thinking: “I’m excited to write my company blog!”

Or at least they are at the beginning…

Yet, the truth is that the majority of business owners do not know how to create a SUCCESSFUL company blog.

They’re making too many basic mistakes, barely attracting any traffic and not converting the people who do read into customers….

There’s loads of business bloggers who are persistently publishing new content on a regular basis.

Sadly, their fortunes won’t be changing no matter how many posts they write. Their blog will remain a sad lonely place, until they get the basics right.

Below is a summary of the crucial tasks you need to undertake to create an incredible company blog. These are the jobs that the amateurs simply aren’t doing…

1. Define your niche

It’s understandable that you want to boast about all of the awesome things going on at your workplace. You’re probably dying to wax lyrical about all the amazing things your business does. But this is WRONG for two reasons.

Firstly, you’re better off being the master of a few trades, rather than the business who dabbles in everything.

We’d love to be the go-to blog for ‘online marketing’ but that’s too broad for all but the biggest brands.

Instead, our blog focuses on how to create incredible written content for your business blog.

That’s pretty much all we write about. It’s much more targeted, so we attract readers who are far more interested in our services. That’s the one of the reasons why so many readers go on to investigate the article writing services we offer.

Secondly, while it’s OK to write about yourself, focus on helping your audience.

The main thing your audience cares about is having their problems solved, so do that for them.

Solve their problems. Demonstrate your expertise. Give away everything you know. But don’t boast directly about how awesome you are. That’s not how content marketing works.

Once the reader learns to trust you, they’ll search out more information about your services.

2. Develop a plan for building traffic

Don’t work hard, work smart.

By putting together a strategy for building traffic, you can ensure that all of your blog posts are surefire hits.

Here are some recommendations:

Find 10-15 keywords that your target audience is likely to be searching for. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and Moz will all be helpful here.

Once you’ve done this keyword research, you’re ready to start drafting some blog topics.

For starters, you can create pillar pages surrounding all of your primary keywords. This takes a lot of work, but the payoff is huge).

Once these pillar pages are created, try discovering what sort of questions your target audience is asking on social media networks like Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn or other industry-specific forums to find out what they’re struggling with. From there, answer their queries as best as you can.

With each post, create a list of influencers who you are going to ask to share the post. Ideally, you’ll have built professional relationships with loads of influencers in your niche. If so, they should be only too happy to help you out.

If you haven’t, a great strategy to build these relationships is to include a quote from them in one of your posts.

We’ve seen, time and again, that influencers are more willing to share work that they’ve helped contribute too, especially if you were generous enough to add a backlink to their website. After all, this will help boost their reputation as a thought leader.

Here is an example of some outreach emails that even the most popular influencers won’t be able to ignore.

3. DO SOMETHING To Stand Out

Words will never hurt me, and they’re not enough to help a blog post to stand out from the noise in 2018 either.

Throw some cool ‘sticks and stones’ content in there that’ll impact the reader and break them from their social media scrolling slumber.

This could be an eye-catching image, a useful infographic, a fun animated video or some interactive flash content.

Use whatever resources you have at your disposal.

If you’re not convinced that eye-catching images are necessary for your content marketing efforts, check out these stats.

4. Turn Your Readers Into Subscribers

At the very least, you need a strong call to action at the end of your post.

It’s recommended to use this CTA to point people towards a free downloadable that goes even deeper on the subject at hand.

With this strategy, readers provide their email address, get the download sent there and are automatically added to your email list.

Sumo is a great tool, which automates this whole process, but there are tons of others out there.

Please throw your weak pathetic ineffective ‘subscribe for future updates’ CTAs in the virtual bin, alongside Chuck Norris jokes and Harlem Shake videos. They might have been cool in the past, but they’re getting completely ignored in 2018.

Neil Patel has published some detailed research-backed tips on creating powerful calls-to-action, including the best part of the page to place it.

Give Your Company Blog A Fighting Chance

While these four steps won’t turn your company blog into the next PerezHilton.com overnight, it’ll give it you a fighting chance of standing in a world where 2 MILLION blog posts are published every day.

If this all sounds like too much hassle for your tiny company, we’re not surprised. We hear this all the time, and that’s why so many businesses outsource the grind of creating a world-class blog to us.

Click the link to learn more about how our article writing services can benefit you.