A business blog people come back to. Steady, sourced, yours.

Readers come back to a business blog that does a few things well and keeps doing them. It mixes timely news with lasting guides. It turns up at a steady pace. It's written from real sources, in your own voice, and a person edits and approves every post before it goes live.

This guide takes each one in turn and explains what it means and what to do with it, whether the site is your own or a client's.

What should a business blog publish?

Two kinds of post, because they do different jobs.

Timely news covers changes that affect your readers now. Something has shifted, and they need to know what it is and what it means for them. News posts date quickly, and that's fine: their job is to be right and useful at the moment they're read.

Lasting guides answer the questions your readers keep asking. They stay useful for months. They're the posts people find later through search, and the ones you can point a customer or member to when the same question comes up again.

Neither works as well alone. A blog of nothing but news looks busy, but once the stories date there's little left worth reading. A blog of nothing but guides goes still, and gives regular readers no reason to check back. Put together, the news gives people a reason to return and the guides give them something to stay for.

A practical start: write down the questions you're asked most often by customers, members or clients. Each one is a candidate guide. Then keep a separate list of the changes that tend to affect those same people. That second list is where your news will come from.

How do you choose which stories to cover?

Run three tests on every candidate story before you write a word.

1. How much does it matter to your readers nationally?
2. How much does it matter to them in your area?
3. Will it still be useful in a month?

A story that fails all three goes. It might be interesting. It might be getting attention elsewhere. If it doesn't matter to your readers and won't be useful later, it isn't for your blog.

Stories that pass some tests and fail others need a judgement call, and the tests tell you what kind of post to write. Take a hypothetical case. A national deadline that affects most of your readers falls in ten days' time. It passes the national test easily. It fails the one-month test, because by then the deadline has passed and the post has nothing left to tell anyone.

It's still worth covering. Your readers need it now, and a short, accurate news post that tells them what's due and when is exactly what they'd want from you. What it doesn't justify is guide-level effort: keep it brief, link to the source, and move on.

The reverse case is different. A story that matters only moderately today but will still be useful in a month is guide material. Give it the time a guide needs. And a story that passes the local test but not the national one can be the most useful thing you publish, if your readers are concentrated in one part of the UK or your organisation serves one region.

The rare story that passes all three may deserve both: a short news post now, and a guide that follows once the detail is clear.

How often should you post?

There's no ideal frequency to aim for, and we don't suggest one.

What they say is that a steady pace you can keep beats a burst of posts followed by silence. A blog launches with a flurry of posts in its first weeks, the work that pays the bills takes over, and nothing appears for months. Visitors notice the date on the last post. A blog that has gone quiet tells them the site isn't being looked after, which is the opposite of what you set out to show.

So pick a rhythm you can sustain alongside your real work. Base it on an ordinary month, not your quietest one. If that means one post a fortnight, one post a fortnight is your pace. Write it down, and when a busy period arrives, protect that one post before you think about adding more.

If you look after several client sites, set a pace for each client separately. A site that matches its own steady rhythm will serve its readers better than one that's been pushed to keep up with a busier neighbour.

How do you make it sound like you?

Your voice already exists. It's on your best pages: the ones that explain what you do clearly, the ones customers or members respond to, the ones you'd be happy for anyone to read.

Learn it from those pages. Read them together and note what they have in common. How long are the sentences? Do you address the reader as "you"? Which words do you use often, and which would you never use? How do you open a page, and how do you end one?

Then write it down. A short description of your voice, a page at most, is enough. It should be something anyone writing for the site can read in a few minutes and apply.

Use it on every post. That matters most when someone new is writing, or when a draft starts from a tool rather than a person. Consistency of voice is part of what makes readers recognise you. When every post sounds like the same organisation, they know whose site they're on, and they know what to expect when they come back.

What is AI slop, and how do you avoid it?

AI slop is generic copy with no facts, no point of view and stock phrases. It could have been written about any business, in any town, for any reader. People spot it quickly, and they don't come back for more of it.

You avoid it in three ways.

• Write from real sources. Every claim in a post should come from something you can point to. If a fact can't be supported, narrow the claim or cut it.
• Write in your own voice, using the description you've written down.
• Have a person edit and approve every post. That person checks the claims against the sources, removes phrases that could belong to anyone, and decides whether the post is ready.

Choose an approver who knows your readers well enough to ask whether a post is useful to them, and who is willing to send it back when it isn't.

One thing to avoid: writing to fool AI detectors. It's tempting to rearrange sentences or add odd words so a checker gives a better score. That aims at the wrong reader. The detector isn't your customer. Tricks that dodge a checker usually make the writing worse for the person who actually reads it. Write for that person, and the problem detectors are looking for tends to disappear with it.

How do you get more from each post and keep it useful?

A good post takes real work: finding the story, checking the facts, getting the voice right. Use that work more than once.

Turn each post into social posts and a short video script, so one piece of work reaches more people. The facts are already checked and the angle is already decided. A social post can lead with the single most useful point and send readers to the full piece. A short script can explain the same point out loud for people who would rather watch than read. Draft both from the approved post, and have them approved too, so they say no more than the post can support.

Then look after what you've published. Keep older guides up to date, and say on the page when you last did. A plain line near the top, such as "Last updated" followed by the date, tells readers the guide is being kept current and lets them judge how far to rely on it.

A fixed calendar would miss the point. Review a guide when the facts it relies on change. One habit makes that easier: when you publish a guide, note the handful of facts it depends on. When one of them changes, you know which guides to revisit. Often that change is also a news story, which brings the two kinds of post back together.

Every post, guide and script should be written from real facts and read by a person before it goes anywhere. Nothing is published by itself.

See how the Desk takes a post from source facts to your approval.