Back in July, we had a client that was looking to get into business blogging, and asked the Bradford Group to lead a lunch-n-learn that covered the basics of BtoB blogs. We covered a lot of important stuff in that presentation that I thought would be useful to share here.

1. Business Blogging 101
by Erin Gagnon
Account Manager & Director of Strategy
the Bradford Group

2. Agenda
• Why Blog?
• Content
- The basics
- Headlines
- Visuals
• Keywords
• Optimize
• Promote

3. Why Blog?
• Blogging helps you attract new
visitors to your website and
convert those visitors into leads
• Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors
than those who don’t
• BtoB companies that blog generate 67% more leads
per month than those that don’t

4. Why Blog?
• 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog
readers
• Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and
97% more indexed links
• 92% of companies that blogged multiple times a day
acquired a customer through their blog

5. Content – the Basics
• Use an editorial calendar to organize contributors, deadlines
and post topics
- Your blog posts should all serve larger company goals
• Brainstorm a quarter’s worth of post topics as a team
- Answer frequently asked questions – from prospects, networking, etc.
- Create lists
- How to guides
- Pose questions to your social media networks
- Focus on negative phrases heard from clients and respond
- Create infographics
- Create short videos, webinars or SlideShare presentations
- Comment on trends or news
- Bundle existing content (blog, website page, emails, etc.)
- Transform internal presentations into external blogs
- Tailor existing content to different target clients or verticals

6. Content – the Basics
• Write like you talk
• Don’t plagiarize
• Edit x2
• Use calls-to-action
• Use bullets and numbered lists
- Make your posts easy to scan
• Insert links (internal and external)
• Blog posts should be as long as they need to be (search
engines prioritize longer content)

7. Content – Headlines
• The only part of a blog post your reader is guaranteed to see is the
headline
• Give your readers an idea of what you will cover without giving too much
away
- Titles containing 60 characters received the most social shares
- Titles that included a single question mark have 46.30% social shares, nearly
double that for titles without question marks

8. Content –
Headlines

9. Content – Visuals
• Include a relevant image (picture, screenshot, embedded video or slideshow) with
every post
• Pay attention to image copyrights
- http://photopin.com/
- http://www.freeimages.com/

10. Keywords
• Focus on long-tail keywords instead of broad keywords
- Specific to your firm
- Lower search volume
- Less competition

11. Optimize for Search Engines
• Focus on 1 or 2 keywords for each post (long-tail keywords)
- Headline
- First/second sentence
- Sprinkle a few times in the post body
- Meta description
- Image alt-tags

12. Promote Through Social Media
• Share your post on all your company and personal social channels
• Email posts directly to personal, relevant connections

13. Thank You!