We all know the Swiss Army knife, right? It’s the multi-purpose tool that’s become a portmanteau for something that is all things to all people. The business blog is one of those things for any B2B company. I previously talked about how it can help you generate 5 different content types for your content marketing.

But it’s not all about increasing your content volume, right? There’s got to be other ways your blog could perform better for your business. Ways that don’t take a lot of time, since we’re all so busy. Here are 7 ways you can take your business blog to the next level and create even MORE value for your blog.

The Saw: Revise Your Old Headlines

When you first published your posts, you probably created a killer headline that would get a lot of clicks. Lots of traffic from social media or in your newsletter. And that’s great. Since you’ve been posting regularly, all those killer headlines are getting pushed down your blog, and are only showing up in your archives.

Or are they? Remember, every time you publish a post, the page it’s on gets indexed by search engines. That means that each post and page has organic value to the SERPs (search engine results page). Which means that if you go back and revise the headline from an SEO perspective, you’ll get even more organic traffic from them. For example, my old post “Be In Control like Rafa: Take Charge of Your Company’s Twitter Account” could be revised to “How to Handle My Company’s Twitter Account”. I’ve gone from a topical headline, to one that is more keyphrase-friendly.

The Fork: Optimize Your Calls-to-Action

While the headline gets your audience reading the post, it’s your calls-to-action (CTA) that starts them down the sales funnel and converts them from leads to customers. And with a new blog, your CTAs might not have been as strong as they could be, or maybe you didn’t even have any in those older posts.

This is why it’s important to optimize them in each and every blog post. You want to make sure that your readers become prospects, and ultimately customers. Your blog is a powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal, so let’s make sure that it’s at full power. Go back into your old posts and optimize the ones that are there. Link them to new and improved landing pages that talk about new offers from your company. Add ones to posts that didn’t have any, and link them to your newsletter list.

If you want to get even more fancy, you could do some testing of your CTAs, and see which ones perform better. Set up different links for the different CTAs and then tweak the ones that are underperforming.

Don’t worry about doing any testing if you’re just getting into this whole business blogging thing. Getting CTAs in all blog posts is an excellent step.

The Screwdriver: Revise Your Post Content

Just because you’ve published the content a while ago doesn’t mean you can’t revise it. Go take a look at your analytics and see which past posts have performed well (you’re looking at clicks, inbound links, and shares on social media.) These topics are already popular with your readers, so why not re-engage them with some fresh content about it?

There’s a number of ways you can do this:

• Update any stats you might have mentioned.
• Add new outbound links to other articles.
• Write an addendum based on any comments you received.
• Insert some appropriate images to the post.

Updating the content attracts both new and old readers to a post. New readers like the new content (duh), but the old readers may have forgotten reading it originally, so it seems new to them. (Don’t blame them, there’s a lot of content out there on the Interwebs, it’s easy to get lost in the haze of volume & time.)

The Toothpick: Pick Out New Topics for the Future

Much like using a toothpick to clean your teeth, you can use your blog to pinpoint new topics for future posts. Okay, maybe that analogy wasn’t too obvious, but what I’m trying to say is that new topics are just waiting for you in your blog. Use  your website analytics to see what keywords and phrases readers are using to find your blog. Look at the page view stats and compare the numbers of raw views, and also the time spent on the pages. This will tell you which posts are popular and which aren’t, but also can give you an idea of which ones are too long or complicated. Maybe you need to keep the topics shorter and the points a little shorter?

Don’t ignore the lower numbers in your stats, as it might just mean that at the time the post was published, it wasn’t relevant to your readers. SERP analysis today will tell  you if that’s the case.

Of course all of this is only doable if you’ve got analytics set up on your site. If you don’t, then get to it! See how much information you’re missing out on?

The Little Knife: Be Nice and Share

This one is a MUST have if you’re in the technology business, even in the B2B world. Optimize it for social media, and you’re golden. Make sure you’ve got social sharing buttons installed on the blog, and that the appropriate communities/platforms are represented. This lets you expand not only your social reach and network, but lets you extend the reach of your blog content. Connections like sharing content from others in their circles. This gives you social proof, which is a signal to the rest of your readers that you’re a trusted advisor, and an expert. Two things that are the keys to growing your business.

The Big Knife: Dance with the One that Brought You

No, I’m not quoting a country song by a popular Canadian singer (no, not THAT one, the OTHER one). I’m talking about taking care of the pages that bring you the most traffic. You should always be aware of which pages on your site, or the posts on your blog that bring you the most traffic. And you should always be taking care of them. Use any and all of the tools mentioned on this page to keep them looking and reading nicely, and they’ll always bring you organic traffic.

This is where you might be looking at things like your sidebar, any banners or banner ads you’re displaying, any outbound links that are getting lots of clicks, and especially the inbound links. Maybe consider turning some of that content into landing pages or new blog posts? You could have a lot of fun with this information.

The Round Thingy for Your Keys

The last thing would be to remember that you should always be producing top-quality content. If you do that, then your blog becomes the go-to tool for your readers, who hopefully become customers in the end.