By Michelle Salater

Blogging for business is an investment that will attract not only prospects, but also media and key influencers. When you know what you’re doing, and do it consistently, blogging is simple and fun, and it’s a vital part of your marketing strategy to generate profits and continuous exposure for you and your business.

Many business bloggers struggle with their blogs—from attracting more readers to knowing what to write about. Below are a few foundational elements that will help you end your struggle and position yourself as a number one blogger:

Know your exact audience. Narrowing your target reader is a fundamental element to building blog readership. To help you get clear, write down all of the characteristics of your ideal reader, including his or her appearance, place of residence, favorite pastime activities, annual income, occupation, age, and any other demographics and psychographics you can think of. The worst thing you can do is be everything to everyone and try to appeal to all brides-to-be. I promise—that when you get as specific as possible about what brides you want to target—that you will find a dramatic increase in your blog readership and appeal to more brides than you even dreamed of.

Don’t bore your reader to death. The purpose of a blog is to share enticing information with like minded individuals. It’s not meant to bore the life out of readers with industry jargon and highly professional phrases, and content. Don’t be afraid to be funny, sarcastic, or opinionated. Potential brides want to connect with your personality and feel connected to you. If you write stuffy content in your most professional manner possible, your audience will find it difficult to connect with your personality—probably because you lack one on your blog!

Develop a writing and publishing schedule. Never stray from your blog writing and publishing schedule. It’s designed for the purpose of keeping you in line and ensuring that you provide your audience with consistent posts that offer valuable advice and tips. A schedule also enables you to visualize what topics you’ve already covered, which encourages you to find fresh ideas that you haven’t yet discussed on your blog.

For your writing schedule, I suggest setting aside time each week or every other week to write blog posts. Batching helps prevent repetition and ensures you aren’t scrambling at the last moment to find something to write about. It takes some self discipline, but in the end, it pays off.

Use social media. Generating fresh ideas on the regular is a key component to establishing yourself as a prominent blogger. Some of the best places to look for fresh ideas and content are on your social media accounts. Here, you can observe and interact with both brides-to-be and other wedding vendors to see what they’re interested in hearing about and discussing. From there, you can generate a list of fresh blog post topics that relate to your audience’s particular interests.

Twitter is one of my favorite tools for generating new topic ideas. One of the main reasons I visit Twitter is to search for trending topics, ideas, industry news, opinions, and interesting articles. It usually only takes me five minutes of surfing Twitter to develop a list of great topic ideas for my blog.

Are you sick and tired of putting your heart and soul into your business blog with no results? Then you want to make it a point to be on my free webinar “How to Increase Profits and Exposure with a Business Blog” happening June 15, 2011, 1–2 p.m. Eastern / 10-11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up today and learn to Love Your Blog here!

Michelle Salater is the president of Sūmèr, LLC. As an avid business blogger, Michelle has grown her small business marketing blog Copy Doodle, Copy Doodle, to be a powerful lead generation and client education tool. Recently, was listed #17 out of Technorati’s 100 Best Small Business Blogs.