After a few years of working with business owners and startups to develop business blogs for their websites, I’ve identified five key success factors.

Blogging for business is a different animal than most traditional marketing tactics.   Your successful business blog is not a marketing campaign that has a start and stop point.  Business blogging is not a glitzy promotion that you can completely outsource to an agency.

So if you’re a beginner, here are five success factors that make blogging for business a successful tactic to help you attract customers.

Success factor #1: Think of blogging for business and your content as an extension of your daily conversations with customers and prospects.

Business owners have told me (countless times) that blogging isn’t for them because… “I’m not a writer!”

You don’t have to become a book author or even a reporter in order to blog for your business.  You’re creating your business blog because you want to share your industry experience, expertise and knowledge. You are sharing your knowledge with like-minded people.  Much like you do today in the course of running your company.

A business blog is an “online conversation”.  When you start out with a new blog, the conversation will be one-sided.  You’re sharing valuable, useful, informative, interesting, timely information—content—with your prospects and customers.

You’ll be having similar “conversations” on your business blog that you typically have in person with prospects and customers.  Use the same sorts of topics that you discuss with your prospects and buyers over the phone, at networking events, and trade shows. Recreate the information you share during face-to-face meetings with prospects.  (Of course, with the exception of sharing proprietary information.)

Success factor #2: Develop basic goals for your business blog.

Your blog goals should be in support of your business goals.  Create a brief strategy or a plan for what you’d like your business blog to accomplish.  A basic 1-2 page blog plan is sufficient.  Start by identifying the top goals you’d like your business blog to achieve.  Some ideal business blog goals are:

–  To build your list of prospects and find new customers by increasing the number of qualified visitors to your website.  A constant supply of fresh, accurate, and helpful content will help you increase your website visitors.

– To position yourself as a thought leader in your industry.  If your company isn’t yet well known in your industry, you can use your blog to change that.    Demonstrate your leadership, experience and vision by taking a stand on industry issues.  Drive the larger discussion on emerging issues for your industry, by writing on topics that cause people to think differently.

– To strengthen your company’s brand and your personal brand by demonstrating your problem solving expertise.  You can accomplish this by creating one-of-a-kind, useful how-to blog articles (blog posts).  Create content that shares insider tips about accomplishing goals that your prospects may not be familiar with.  Create instructive articles and information explaining how to expedite pesky tasks relevant to your products and services.

Success factor #3: Prepare a killer blog content plan.

List your customers’ top problems and goals.  The issues that you get the most excited about discussing when talking with your customers in person.  These are the topics that you’ll be most excited to use for creating content.   Go for the toughest problems in your industry.

The foundation of a successful business blog really is the quality of your content. Prepare blog information that is valuable to your specific customers and prospects.   Scope out your competitors’ blog or website content.  Up your game!  Create articles about topics they’re missing.  Go deeper. Go bigger.  Create a series of how-to articles about a painful issue facing your customers and prospects.

Success factor #4: Develop a blogging operational game plan that fits your business, your lifestyle and your resources.

One of the huge benefits of adding a blog to your business website is that you can update the blog (and so your website) with fresh articles, or videos weekly. Or as often as you like.  And you don’t need a website developer.  Assign team members, and yourself, to blog content creation tasks.

After the blogging system is installed on your website, adding new articles (or blog posts) is as easy as using Microsoft Word, Google pages or other word processor.

Success factor #5. Stay involved with executing your business blog plan.

Completely outsourcing your business blog development and ongoing content isn’t a good idea.  Even if you hire outside writers, it’s a mistake to not remain involved just as you would with any other business initiative to grow your company.   It’s your company and your reputation is online and on-the-line.  Treat your business blog just as you would any other strategic initiative.

Valuable Content is a Must

If your customers use the Internet to find solutions, then the content on your business website and company blog are crucial.  It’s tough to maintain your online brand, your online identity and to “be found” when your customers are searching. You’ll need an ongoing supply of fresh content.

Follow these success factors when putting together a your blogging game plan. They are helpful whether you’re adding a business blog or are sprucing up your current one.

The first steps aren’t about which blogging software to use.  The first steps are how well does your website or business blog content engage the Web searcher who lands on your site?  How well will you be remembered by your future customers? What do you have to say that establishes your expertise?

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