Business Blog Topic Ideas – Using Your Blog As A Business Communication Tool
Developing toipics from your ideas will provide you with an effective and powerful tool for communicating and interacting directly with your customers.
Not only can you communicate and interact with existing and potential customers on your own terms through a business blog, but you can also control the communication, by deciding what content gets shown on your blog, managing visitor comments, etc.
A WordPress-powered business lets you build relationships with people online and provide up-to-date information about your business and your industry.
Most importantly, since blogging is a form of social media, you can employ several strategies and methods to encourage more participation and interaction from your site visitors, turning your business into a dynamic and powerful two-way communication tool.
Here are just some ideas on how to turn your business blog into a more effective business communication tool:
Business Blog Topic Ideas
Create A Community
Creating a community where people can share ideas and ask questions is powerful.
If you run a WordPress-powered site, there are plugins available that can help you create a community on your blog.
For example, a popular WordPress plugin for creating engagement and a sense of community is the Disqus Comment System …
Disqus (pronounced “discuss”), is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. The Disqus comment system replaces the WordPress comment system and makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
Disqus turns your blog into its own social media channel. Users sign up to comment on your blog and all of their comments are then integrated. Whenever a user leaves a comment on your blog, it adds a link to their blog. Disqus users can also keep track of comments they’ve left at other Disqus-enabled blogs around the net.
Disqus is free to use and offers a powerful discovery feature that helps you increase engagement, build an audience and earn revenue.
Another option for community building is to add a forum to your business blog. WordPress offers a number of stable and well-supported forum plugins with a range of features to suit the needs of most most business blogs.
Here are just some of the WordPress forum plugins worth checking out:
- WPMUDEV – On this site you will find a number of robust community-building WordPress plugins including a Forum plugin, Q&A plugin, Communities Plugin (creates internal communities with their own discussion boards, wikis, news dashboards, user lists and messaging facilities) and Wiki plugin (turns any WordPress post, page or entire site into a fully functional and easy to use wiki).
- bbPress – The bbPress plugin is a popular forum plugin for WordPress, with the focus on keeping things light and lean. This is achieved by installing a core bbPress plugin, then adding extra functionality using bbPress add-on plugins, which are developed by other third-party developers.
- Mingle Forum – Mingle Forum is lightweight, solid, secure, quick to setup, easy to use, and integrates seamlessly with or without the Mingle social networking plugin. The focus of this forum plugin is to keep things simple and the developers boast that you can be up and running with Mingle Forum fully installed and configured in as little as 5 minutes.
- WPForum Server – This is a complete forum system for your business blog. Being a plugin, no additional work is needed to integrate it into your WordPress site.
- Simple:Press – Simple:Press is a feature-rich forum plugin that can be scaled to the needs of your community. It offers many features that are normally only available from a stand-alone forum application.
(demo screenshot of Simple:Press forum plugin for WordPress)
Business Blog Topic Ideas
Obtain Feedback
One of the best ways to use your blog is to elicit customer feedback. And one of the best ways to obtain feedback with a blog, is to end your blog posts with a question.
Here are just some of the types of questions you can ask at the end of a blog post to elicit feedback from readers:
- “What do you think about …?” (the topic of your blog post)
- “Did we miss anything?” (useful for list and review blog posts)
- “Did you find this post useful?” (tips and how to blog posts)
- “Do you have a similar experience that you would like to share?” (posts focused on success stories, case studies, etc.)
- “What other solutions have you tried? Let us know …” (tips, lists, how-tos, etc …)
- “Is this the approach you would have taken?” (case studies, interviews, etc …)
Another way to get feedback from your blog visitors is to run opinion polls and surveys.
A great WordPress plugin for adding polls to your blog is WP-Polls …
WP-Polls is a free WordPress plugin that lets you easily add customizable polls to your blog’s posts and pages.
For adding surveys to your blog, check out these plugins:
- WP Survey and Quiz Tool – This is a free, customizable Quiz, Survey and Poll plugin that allows you to add unlimited questions and sections.
- Surveys WordPress Plugin – This free WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side either in aggregate format, or as individual responses.
- WordPress Simple Survey – WordPress Simple Survey is a free plugin that allows you to create surveys, polls, quizzes, or questionnaires and track user submissions. Scores, Names, and Results can be recorded, emailed, and displayed in the WordPress backend.
Blog visitors typically love sharing their opinions and letting you know what they think and how they feel. This is a great way to get valuable information and feedback from your target audience.
Business Blog Topic Ideas
Always Respond
One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a blog owner is to ignore someone who has taken the time to leave a comment or post a question on your blog. Always respond to someone who has left a comment on your blog, especially genuine visitors who are interested in your content.
Useful tip: With WordPress, you can automatically thank people who leave comments on your posts using a free plugin called Thank Me Later …
Thank Me Later sends ‘thank you’ emails to your commenters. You can specify when the email gets sent (e.g. minutes or hours after the comment is posted, or a day, week or month later, etc …).
You can use this plugin to attract readers back to your blog by asking them to check for replies to their comments, link to your RSS feed, follow you on Twitter, like your Facebook page, or give a discount for purchases.
Additionally, you can send out emails with HTML, use tags like [name] to make your emails more personal, and write custom emails for each category or post on your blog.
Even if the comment seems trifle or meaningless, take the time to post a quick thank you or reply if it comes from a genuine visitor (if it’s spam just delete it). Your blog visitors will see this as your willingness to engage with and be friendly and helpful to users. This is all good communication and helps you get a dialogue going that people can participate in.
Frame Yourself As An Expert
Building authority and credibility online is important and a business blog topic can really help you establish your expertise.
Use your blog to inform your readers about new developments in your industry and other things that your readers wouldn’t know or have the time to find out.
Useful tip: One of the easiest and fastest ways to build up your expertise online is to subscribe to the top newsletters, feeds and blogs in your industry, then “curate” some of the content you receive into regular blog posts that are specifically aimed at providing your readers and subscribers with an industry “round up” and perhaps even some commentary to prompt debate and engage your readers into starting a discussion on your post.
Go here for a great article on content curation.
In addition to showing your readers that you know your industry, it also attracts new prospects that are looking for the information you offer.
Announce New Products And Services
Use your blog to advertise what’s new with your business. Showcase your products and services. You can also use your blog to offer special deals and exclusive promotions to your readers and newsletter subscribers (for example, you can add a discount coupon or discount code for subscribers in your welcome email).
If you plan to add coupons to your site, then consider using an e-commerce plugin (we’ll review these in a separate blog post), or use a plugin like JC Coupon Plugin Lite to add coupons on any post or page on your blog. JC Coupon is a WordPress coupon plugin that lets you set an expiry date or custom text for coupon expiry. Coupon offers that have passed their expiry date will not show up on your blog …
You can engage visitors on your blog by asking readers to talk about any features they would like to see added to the product and post these in the comments section. You can then reply and let them know if your product already has those features, or if you plan to add these in the future (or if not, explain why not and what the challenges are).
A word of caution – don’t use your blog simply for promoting your products or services. People will get tired and disinterest very quickly if all they see when they visit your site is advertising and promotional content. Balance promotional messages with more informative and engaging posts.
Branding
Your business blog gives you the opportunity to broadcast your brand message around the world. Use it to tell people what you and your business are all about. The great thing about having a blog is that you have total control of your brand message. A blog is, among other things, a great brand reputation management tool.
As a final thought, consider this. When you have a business blog, it’s not enough to simply drive traffic to it using online methods of promotion or advertising. You also have to get offline visitors and potential customers as well. When communicating with customers and prospects offline, therefore, make sure that they know you have a blog. Tell people what they can expect to find on your site and offer them an incentive to visit and participate in your online environment.
If you need help getting a blog set up for your small business we can help. We also provide a number of useful training tutorials to customers on branding your business, engaging with your customers and creating better business communication through tools that promote user interaction using a WordPress blog.
WordPress is huge and can sometimes be overwhelming about where to start. As you move on to the next Page, you will have a clearer picture of where to start and progress to building a professional WordPress Site