7 ways to improve your startup’s company blog

In a previous article, we described the several advantages of having a blog on your company’s website. Unfortunately, the web is full of blogs and in order to stand out, it takes a lot of work and a clear strategy.Here are seven simple ways to improve the quality of your startup’s company blog and increase the number of visitors:

Choose your topic

Before you even start blogging, you should clearly choose a topic and stick to it. In the best case scenario, you are an expert in a certain field and people are aware of your wisdom already. For example, an entrepreneur in the cloud computing-business can act as an expert for this branch. People prefer to know what they can expect if they type in your URL.

Continuity

Be sure to write at a certain frequency. Professional bloggers claim that you should write on a daily basis. But, as an entrepreneur, you also have a core business to take care about. Nevertheless, you should write at least once a week. Users who find the same content on your front page each time they visit your website will be disappointed and as a consequence, spend their time online elsewhere.

KISS

There is a basic rule for journalism, which also applies to blog posts - “Keep It Short & Simple” (KISS). Avoid complicated sentences, use paragraphs to structure your article and stick to one key message. Of course, that’s not easy. It’s quite likely that you have a lot of information in your head and want to send it out to the world. But keep in mind that it’s better to have three short articles instead of one long story that nobody will bother reading.

Use tags & categories

Blogs allow you to structure your posts in categories and add tags to them. There has been a lot of discussion on the question whether tags and categories improve your page rank on Google or not. Actually, it doesn’t matter. Humans visiting your site are more important than some Google bots and they will be glad to find a clear structure on your blog and be able to dig deeper into topics they are interested in.

Cooperate

Find fellow bloggers and cooperate with them. Link to their pages and ask them to do the same. Not only will that improve your Google page rank, but it’ll also drag some of their readers onto your site. Also, you can exchange articles. That will show your competence to your partner’s clients and you can offer additional knowledge to your own readers.

Share and interact

We live in the age of social networks and therefore, we should use them to our advantage. Share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and Google+. There are several plug-ins which actually even make it possible to share your content automatically. For example, the Facebook-plugin “Networked Blogs” posts article automatically to your Facebook wall, allows people to subscribe and even integrates you into the community. Also, make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your RSS-feed. And allow them to share the content individually via buttons at the end of every posting. For example, the Wordpress-plugin “Social Bookmarking RELOADED” will add a bar of icons to your postings that allow sharing via various social networks. Also, be sure to integrate a “Like” button for Facebook-fanatics and a “+1” button for users of Google+. India is ranked second globally (after the USA) in terms of the number of Google+ users and this community needs to be served.

Go mobile

In India, more than 40 million internet users access the web via mobile devices and 59 percent of them use only mobile phones to access the web. It would be a pity to not reach these potential readers just because your website doesn’t look nice on a mobile phone. Therefore, add a plugin to automatically create a mobile version of your blog. For example, the free Wordpress-plugin “WPtouch” does a good job here.

For more such tips & tricks, watch this space. Also, do write to us at [email protected] about your thoughts on this story.

Stefan Mey | YourStory.in

Image Courtesy: AlaModeStuff