Are you a blogger? Do you blog? Does your website have a blog? Not necessarily the day-to-day musings of a married mother of three who moves from privileged middle class urban family life to privileged middle class rural family life type of blog.

More a blog that:

• Shares useful and important industry related information perhaps
• Invites feedback and interaction
• Strengthens your SEO and improves search engine positioning
• Extends the reach of your search engine coverage with ‘long tail’ keywords
• Offers a feel for you as a company, the way you like to operate, you values and beliefs.
• Gets under the corporate armour that so many companies wear and reveals a more human side to your organisation
• Reveals your range of skills and competencies
• Inspires people to sign up or regularly visit
• That builds a following
• Builds trust and eventually leads to extra business

Are you making the most of your blog? Here are 3 ways you can improve your blog

Share. Don’t use your blog to take, use it to give. Share the most useful information you can. If what you give is valuable enough, if it resonates, you will attract an audience. It takes a lot of giving to get a return but if you engage with enough people over time the rewards can be handsome. Write to the highest standard you can afford and always try to add value to your readers’ experience.

Understand that a blog takes commitment. Anything worth having does. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a lot of fun and that you won’t meet plenty of great people on the journey. If you are organised and plan ahead then maintaining your blog (assuming you don’t intend to post twice a day) should be pretty straightforward.

Relax. Blogging is a marathon not a sprint. If you run around the place expecting everything to happen instantly you’ll be dispirited and burnt out in no time at all. Be patient. Building an audience, a reputation, authority and search engine positioning through a blog takes time. It’s an organic process. And even if you are a patient person you will in all probability enter what is referred to as ‘the trough of disillusionment.’ It’s the place where you can’t help asking: ‘is this worth it? Am I just wasting my time?’

Use these times to keep assessing your blog for relevance and to check you are being generous enough with your content. Talk to your web marketing or SEO copywriting specialist for more information.