Business blogging can seem like quite a challenging task, especially when considering all that's at stake. An effective blog can help your marketing campaign become incredibly successful. A blog can help increase exposure of your brand as well as increase your brand authority, just to name a few of its potential benefits. If your blog isn't effective, it won't do any of those things!

So how exactly can you ensure that your company blog can help you to achieve your marketing goals? The following are the three basic principles of business blogging that you should keep in mind in order to ensure that your blog content is effective at helping you reach your marketing goals:

1. Know your target audience

The content you are writing for your blog should be directed at someone - you need readers, after all! One of the more common mistakes that bloggers make is to attempt to write content that appeals to everyone. The problem with this is that everyone is not the same. By trying to direct your blog at as wide of an audience as possible, you end up not reaching anyone at all.

So how do you figure out who your audience is? By creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional sketch of your average customer. Buyer persona's are made up of some of the following details:

• Age
• Gender
• Profession
• Financial status
• Goals
• Problems
• Education
• Shopping habits

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These elements are important not just in determining what kind of content to write, but also what tone and voice to use when writing it. If your buyer persona consists of wealthy males in their late 50s, then writing about how to save money on college supplies using current online slang is probably not going to appeal to the majority of your audience.

With a buyer persona, you'll have a much better idea of who your audience is. And when you know who your audience is, you'll have a better idea of what kind of content you should be writing and how you should be writing it in order to reach that audience.

2. Create high-quality content

Once you know who your audience is, you should focus on creating high-quality content - this means creating content that is relevant to your brand and that is informative and helpful to your readers. The following are a few tips to keep in mind as you create content for your blog:

• Avoid being too promotional - Your audience is reading your blog because they want to become informed about a certain topic. They don't want to read a bunch of advertisements, so avoid trying to make sales using your blog.
• Keep it short and sweet - Long-form content can work well in some cases, but with a blog, it's usually better to keep it short in order to maintain a singular focus - and to keep the attention of your readers.
• Don't ignore the titles - The quality of your titles is just as important as the quality of your content. Your title needs to explain exactly what your content is about while also generating interest. A boring, vague title will cause readers to skip over your blog post.
• Break up your text - Few readers will want to make their way through an enormous wall of text. Break up your blog posts using headers, bullet points and numbered lists.
• Use visual content - Attract the eye of the reader by complimenting your text with visuals, whether it's charts and graphs or photographs. Visuals help break up the text and can also provide more context for your content to make it easier to scan.
• Vary your content - Not all of your blog content has to be text-based. Add a bit of variety to your blog by posting original video content, slideshows and infographics.

3. Have a goal

Knowing who your audience is and writing high-quality content will get you far - but you're going to have no idea where it is you're going unless you have a clear goal. What is it that you want to achieve with your business blogging? Without goals, your blog will be aimless and you won't be able to judge its performance. You can't determine if your blog is doing well if there's no goal to meet, after all. The following are a few of the common business blogging goals:

• Increase web traffic
• Increase brand exposure
• Increase leads
• Increase conversions
• Increase sales
• Build brand trust
• Build brand loyalty
• Build brand authority

You can have multiple goals, but keep in mind that it's better to have one or two main goals so that your blogging is more focused - in the same way that it's better to write to a specific audience.

These are the three basic principles of business blogging that you should keep in mind.