When it comes to blogs for business-to-business marketing, here are some shocking stats

  • B2B marketers that use blogs get 67 percent more leads than those that don't, according to HubSpot.
  • Websites with a blog tend to have 434 percent more indexed pages.

A company blog presents a huge opportunity to establish your industry expertise and extend your audience reach through social sharing, but it can be time-consuming. To make it effective, you need to post on a regular basis. Plus, you need to share interesting content and enlist experts to help you create the content.

Today and tomorrow, Promotional Consultant Today shares these 14 best practices from members of the Forbes Agency Council for creating an effective company blog.

1. Focus On Quality Over Quantity. There is no evidence that more traffic, and ultimately more sales, are generated by producing more frequent articles that are less in-depth. Instead, focus on producing the very best in-depth articles.

2. Define Your ROI Measurements. When launching a new blog, it's critical to define how you will measure success and ROI. What is your new blog intended to achieve? Greater organic search traffic? Social shares? Audience feedback? Inbound links? New opt-ins? New leads? New revenue? Then, look to continually optimize over time based on these metrics.

3. Organize Your Content Calendar. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is not creating an organized content calendar and not sticking to it. Post content at least three times a week and weave in real-time topics or current events to keep content fresh.

4. Write Purposefully. Most brands strive to write with targeted keywords but delay posting because the writing isn't perfect. Our advice is to write naturally, with frequency. Contextual keywords will flow as a part of that process. The key to blogging is to write consistently because the goal is to increase (with Google) the total volume of contextual information for which your brand is known.

5. Think Beyond A Written Blog. Today, social platforms from Facebook to LinkedIn are prioritizing video. Can you share your thoughts in a short, compelling video? If so, it will be easy to write a blog post based on what you've said. You can embed the video on the blog and share it on social channels.

6. Be Consistent With Posting Frequency. To make your blog successful, consistency is king. Choose a frequency that you know you can deliver on and stick with it. Blogs fail when the author writes a few blogs, slacks off on the frequency and then closes the blog down.

7. Establish Expertise, Don't Self-Promote. The purpose of a blog is to add value for customers, not to hard sell. Think of yourself as a subject matter expert and use the space to establish your expertise in your industry and with your product or service. Showcase clients, provide insight into industry trends, report on new technology or illustrate new and innovative ways people use your products.

Want more tips to create an effective and engaging blog? Read PCT again tomorrow.

Source: Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only organization for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies.