A blog is a simple platform for sharing timely and relevant information with your customers. Plus, search engines love valuable content and will reward you for it with top rankings in searches. Blogging can also be an important part of your sales strategy. In fact, according to a HubSpot survey, 60 percent of businesses that have blogs acquire more customers.

So what are you waiting for? In yesterday's issue of Promotional Consultant Today, we shared seven key tips for starting and managing a company blog from the Forbes Agency Council. Today, we share seven more.

1. Choose A Few Key Categories To Write About. When writing a blog and determining keywords, plan out the categories you're going to use. Start with no more than five categories so you can effectively manage and optimize each one of those individually. Not only will this step help with SEO, but it will also force you to think about and plan the content you're going to be publishing.

2. Look At The Volume, Quality, Value And Cost Of Each Post. Use volume, quality, value and cost as your primary key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand the unique visitors you are attracting. Assess whether they are converting, understand what they are worth (cost per lead, cost per visit) and measure the return on investment (ROI) in your campaigns.

3. Go In-Depth. Long-form blog posts have greater value compared to more shorter posts. After you identify the primary topics your business wants to be known for, outline a long-form blog post (greater than 2,000 words) that comprehensively covers the topic.

4. Promote What You Write Outside Of The Blog Itself. Let people know what you're writing about. In other words, promote your blog, whether through your social media channels or by creating a subscriber-based newsletter.

5. Update Your Top-Performing Content. Once you've launched your blog, the job's not over. Continually update the content for your top-performing posts. Someone may visit your oldest blog post and see that it's completely outdated which is never good. If it's a good blog, whether it's old or new, you want to ensure that it's generating traffic and not going to waste.

6. Time It Well. Understanding your customers doesn't only help you create valuable content. It also means that you understand and schedule your posts around the events that matter to them, during the days of the week that they are more likely to engage and during the times of the day they are most likely to read your post.

7. Write About What Matters To Customers. Produce content that is timeless and relevant to your customers, not to your business. Content should educate and pull prospects along the journey to being sales qualified.

Speaking of blogs, PCT returns tomorrow with more relevant content on the importance of rituals in business.

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