Three Ways to Breathe Life Into Your Business Blog

Is your business blogging leading to the incredible website conversions that blogs seem to promise? Do you find yourself carefully crafting a blog post, only to realize later that no one is reading it? There might be a good reason for the failure of your blog. Put simply, it could be that your blog is plain boring.

Boring blogs are blogs that do little more than tow the company line, cram keywords into pages as a way of creating “valuable” web content, and utterly ignore comments – especially any comments that might be construed as negative. If you want business blogging to work for you, here’s a novel idea: Don’t be boring! Here are three suggestions for breathing life into your company blog.

1. Allow a little controversy

Let’s face it: The world wide web is a place that lives and breathes controversy. From using Facebook as a tool to topple oppressive regimes to downright mean comments on news sites, people are drawn to controversy.

Corporations tend to avoid controversy like the plague. However, allowing a little bit of controversy in, whether through blogging about a controversial topic or allowing some “constructive criticism” comments, will draw the attention of readers and build company credibility.

2. The social web is all about relationships

We’ve said it before in our WebProvise blog, we’ll say it again now: Social media appeals to people’s desire to build relationships. If you’re using social media – including your company blog – as one more way to self-promote, without attempting to stimulate conversation or offer your community something useful, then you still don’t understand why social media has gotten so popular in the first place.

3. Internet marketing should take into account human nature

Evolutionary psychology has established a few basic human needs that nearly all of us have. One of them is the desire to bond, which we already addressed in the previous point. Other human desires include the drive to acquire objects and experiences that lend status, the drive to learn, and the drive to defend ourselves, our beliefs, our resources, and our loved ones.

When you write a blog post, even if it’s just for your widget factory, look for ways to tap into these drives that are a universal part of the human experience.

By following these three simple suggestions, you can turn your blog around in no time from being a boring bit of propaganda-like self-promotion to being something people will actually read. After all, isn’t your blog missing the boat if no one but the Google bot reads it?