How to keep your business blog interesting for your readers

Last week I got an email from a friend and she asked me this: "Christelle – we are writing a blog on our company's website and I wondered if you had any tips on how to keep it interesting?"

I was really proud that she was asking me for advice about blogging and felt really compelled and excited to answer her email. So as soon as I got a bit of time, I opened my gmail and started writing a few tips. The email ended up longer than I thought and as I was writing it, I thought to myself: well, actually this would be a perfect story for my blog, my readers can benefit from these tips too. So here we go.

How to keep your blog interesting?

For your business blog, the first thing to do is to think your about blog's objectives. Why are you launching a blog, what are you trying to achieve with it? It will help you make sure that you are writing for the right reasons. I wrote an article on how to define objectives for your website, you can apply the same principles for your blog. 



photo credit: Genista via photo pin cc

Then you need to meet with your colleagues, and list all the types of posts that you can write:

• Case studies


• News


• Upcoming events


• Behind the scene


• People stories


• Tutorials


• Etc..

You could also take a different approach and decide to make your blog a reference for a subject related to your industry. For example I worked with a small printing company in France which was very conscious about the environment (using recycled paper, filtering the water, etc) and made sure to include "green" messages in all their marketing materials. Additionally to their website, they launched a blog focusing only on green, eco-friendly products. The blog is full or product reviews, inspiration articles for gardening, organic cooking, etc. There is absolutely no article related to their business activities, but the blog attracted thousands of followers and further reinforced the company's image.

Using a content calendar

Once you have some ideas around the type of content you want to be published on your site, you need to create a "content calendar". A content calendar is used to plan your stories ahead of time, to make sure that you don't run dry and that your articles will be prepared in advance. It also helps if you have more than one writer or if you need to interview people in your company to source the content. Click here to download a copy of the content calendar template that I created for my blog at work. You can also google "content calendar for your blog" and you'll find plenty of templates. The best idea is to get inspired from the various templates you can find and develop your own based on your particular needs.

Here is how I proceed at work to fill the calendar: I meet once a month with the people involved with the blog and they give me ideas on what stories we can write for the upcoming month: projects ongoing, recent successes, new procedures, new people in the team, etc. They also tell me who I need to interview to get the story. Once we have enough stories, usually around 4 or 5 for a month, we then prioritize them and choose their publication dates. Then I meet with the story teller (the person they referred me to) and conduct a very informal interview, by asking a few questions, listening and taking notes along the way. Later I go back to my desk, write a first draft, leave it for a couple of days, proofread it and send it to the same person for them to check that everything I say is correct.

To me, this way of interviewing my colleagues works very well. People usually like talking about what they do at work and they are the subject matter experts anyway, I am only the messenger.

Going beyond the blog

If you manage to keep up with your articles and respect the dates on your calendar, then you can take this a little bit further and create a monthly newsletter. This is great to push content to your readers' inboxes and make sure they don't miss any of your posts.

By the end of the month, you should have 4 or 5 stories already published so all you need to do to create your newsletter is to list your blog posts with a little introduction text for each of them, a teaser if you like, and include a link to the actual post on your blog.

I hope you found this article helpful, let me know how you plan your blog to make sure it stays interesting. Share your experience by leaving a note in the comments below.