A business blog can help you communicate with your customers, says Craig Killick.

It engages them on a regular basis with an easy to manage platform on the web. Then, there's the potential to attract a new audience along the way. Here are our top ten tips for blogging for your business.

1. Have a defined goal

The most important aspect of having a business-related blog is to define the outcome you want to get from what effectively is a marketing tool.

Your desired outcome should form the basis of how you structure your blog, what you write about and how you drive your blog visitor traffic towards achieving your business goal.

For example, you may want more sales leads through your company website to be driven from blog traffic.

Your blog posts, and any other supplementary content on your blog, need to attract relevant traffic in the first place, with a 'marketing' message that then filters your visitors onto your website.

Call-to-actions also need to point in the right direction and be written in the appropriate way to encourage your readers to take the next step towards your goal.

Any marketing is a form of investment. You need to keep your eye on the return on that investment and how best to achieve it.

2. Understand your audience

It is important to understand the type of audience you want to connect with through your business blog.

The content you write, the language that you use and the benefits you offer to them as readers need to be established to engage them effectively.

Writing industry specific jargon is all well and good when you know what you are talking about, but does your audience use the same words?

If not, you may disenfranchise yourself from them, that is if they can find you through search in the first place. The more intelligence you have on your potential audience, the more you can refine every aspect of your blog accordingly.

How often do they use the internet? Would they be more interested in "free offers" or "top tips", etc.?

3. What's in it for them?

Despite the fact that you are using your blog as a tool to market your business, you need to offer your readers value, otherwise they will stop reading, or go somewhere else.

In the business-to-business environment the best way of achieving this is through sharing knowledge.

Rather than barricading your quality content, such as white papers, behind opt-in 'walls' on your website, why not give it away free on your blog?

Sell your value proposition by displaying your knowledge and the open nature of your business.

This will get people's attention and although it may seem like you are giving things away with no immediate financial return, you will build a pipeline of potential customers who will have bought into your company by the time they make contact.

4. Write right

One advantage of a blog over traditional marketing is the way you can write your content. Your blog posts can be conversational in nature when you write them. This gives you an amazing amount of freedom, which you need to control.

Your blog posts can include keywords and key phrases (good for search engine optimisation). You can use terms within your blog content that you simply can't get away with on your website.

That said, don't go crazy and overload your posts with keywords. Remember, your posts still need to be reader focused.

You need to remember to write using language your readers would use and if you are posting on a regular basis you can also use combinations of words and phrases in different posts to attract varying search terms.

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