Blogging, as part of a larger SEO and online presence strategy, is one of the most effective ways to market your business in the modern era. That’s because there is virtually no financial cost associated with establishing and maintaining a company blog. You may wish to work with an SEO company like Firestarter SEO to help you produce blogs, in which case your cost will likely be built into a larger SEO package, or you may choose to write your blogs yourself, in which case the only cost to you comes in the form of time spent writing the articles. If you do it right, the return on your investment can be huge. If you don’t already have a company blog, or if you’re not making the most of it, now is the time to get started.

But just like any SEO strategy, the best practices for managing your blog change and evolve over time, and it’s a good idea to stay connected to what other companies are doing and keep up with current trends. To that end, here’s what you can expect to see from business blogs in 2019.

Mobile is King

The way we use the internet has changed. Nowadays, more than half of all internet users are accessing the net from a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. That’s a statistic the internet as a whole has had to adapt to by creating mobile optimized versions of existing pages and ensuring that newly built ones are mobile friendly. If your blog is not optimized for mobile devices, readers are likely to become frustrated by hard to read text and navigate away from your page. Incorporating the mobile trend is the best way to ensure that visitors spend time on your page and read your content.

Short Form and Long Form Content

One of the greatest debates among the blogging community has been whether short form content (around five hundred words) or long form contents (over two thousand words) produces better results. The current opinion seems to be that a bit of both is the best solution. Long form content allows you to take a deep dive into the topic you want to discuss, backing up your points with research and writing persuasively or informatively. You can create some strong articles that way. But as helpful as those pieces are, sometimes what readers on the internet want is a quick read, something they can take in and enjoy or even learn from in just a few minutes’ time. If you want your blog to be modern and competitive, use a mix of both types of content.

Be Real

In 2019, people are tired of feeling lied to. It’s something we all have in common right now. We feel misled and we have a hard time trusting the things we see on the internet. It’s a state that’s been contributed to by social media and sensationalist news outlets that don’t wait to verify a story before passing it along, and by headlines that are written to shock and provoke rather than communicate.

That’s why, when it comes to your blog, one of the best ways to reach your readers is authenticity. Make sure your brand identity comes through in everything you write and everything you post. Be transparent. Let your readers see the humanity behind your business. Just the ability to feel the presence of another person behind the words on the page will encourage them to trust you more.

How do you do this? A mixture of good writing and great content. You need a company voice that’s well spoken and approachable, and you need to post content that’s helpful, interesting, and above all, factual. That’s the kind of content that’s going to gain traction in 2019.