How to Make Your Company Blog Read Like a Magazine

We might be in the midst of a digital era, but magazines still hold their place in traditional media. It’s always a nice surprise to get your favorite magazine in the mail and spend some time thumbing through the pages, or even reading it from cover to cover.

There’s just something about magazine content that sucks you in and continuously makes you think. Wouldn’t it be nice if your company blog had the same impact?

The good news is that it can have the same impact, if not better. Instead of envying the style, flow, and allure of your favorite magazine, you can learn from their approach and turn it into an inspiring business blog strategy for your customers.

Pick a Niche, Stay on Topic

Finding your niche is easy—it’s your industry. When you’re developing your business blog strategy, it’s important to keep all of your topics and content relevant to your niche. Readers expect to learn about your industry when they visit your blog, and going too far off topic can be a big turn off.

For example, if you were to buy a fitness magazine, it wouldn’t make much sense to add an article about pet grooming. It’s safe to deviate a little to add some variety, but your business blog topics must somehow relate to your industry.

You can get away with writing about anything in the world on a personal blog. With a company blog, staying on topic helps sell your services.

Offer Your Very Best Advice

Advice columns are a staple for magazines. The difference between advice from magazines vs. the Internet comes down to quality.

People who are paying for a magazine subscription expect to find relevant advice that they can apply to their real world problems. While you can find solid advice for all sorts of problems online, the bar for credibility is raised a little higher for magazines.

The trick is to give quality advice to readers as if they are already paying customers. This will help showcase your value and increase the credibility of your company.

You might be giving away advice for free on your blog, but it’s surefire technique to turn readers into paying customers.

Publish on Time, Every Time

How would you feel if your monthly magazine didn’t show up in the mail as expected? When you dedicate yourself to running a successful company blog, your deadline should be taken just as seriously as any reputable magazine.

Sporadic business blogging won’t help you attract new readers, and it especially won’t have them coming back for more. They’ll eventually grow tired of your unpredictable editorial schedule and abandon your blog all together.

So, when you are strategizing your company blogging calendar, pick a day and stick to it—no matter what.

Showcase Success

Magazines are famous for success stories. This is especially the case for heartfelt stories of real life people who overcame huge obstacles to change their lives. Some typical success stories involve physical transformations, starting a successful business from the ground up, and even heroic stories.

So when we’re talking about showcasing success on your company blog, we don’t mean the success of your own company (although, sometimes this is OK to do).

The success angle needs to come from existing customers. How have they used your product or service to improve their lives? What has your company done for them that has given them a great benefit?

Success stories help your blog in two ways: it inspires readers to take action and inquire about your service, and it also helps establish a connection of trust.

When readers see that you’ve helped another customer solve a problem, they’ll be more willing to take their chances with your company.

Never Duplicate

Any reputable magazine will only publish their own articles, or articles from verified contributors. They will never directly steal from another publication and copy/paste their way to new content. Not only is this copyright infringement, but it will also cause the magazine to lose both readers and credibility.

The same concept applies to your company blog. Directly copying content from another website or stealing ideas is never OK. Not only will you lose trust from your customers, but Google may eventually penalize you for duplicate content.

The way around this issue is to focus on developing unique blog posts for your company. Even if your ideas are similar to those of another blog, adding a fresh perspective can work wonders. You can make overused blog topics work better with your own voice and a new spin.

But better yet, aim to create original business blog topics as often as you can. This helps increase your website traffic and takes your credibility to a new level.

Quality Writing is Key

Do you think the Editor of a magazine writes every article herself? No way. She’s too busy running the ship and helping the magazine become better with each article. Sure, she contributes when she has time, but she has a lot on her plate and depends on her writers to make the magic happen.

This scenario probably sounds all too familiar. You are likely too busy running your business to maintain a company blog, but you recognize its importance for helping your search engine rank and bringing in new customers.

Hiring someone to write your blog posts for you can help keep your blog’s ship sailing, and give you more time to run other aspects of your business.

Not to mention, blog writers have a knack for making your posts a pretty awesome read—possibly even better than a magazine article.

So you might not be Editor-in-Chief of a well-respected magazine publication. But your company blog is still a public forum where customers can come to get advice, find unique stories, and build a connection with your brand.

And as your posts get better with every week, your company blog will become a valuable marketing tool with more impact than any magazine.