Blogging for Your Business
So you want to make a blog for your business. You’ve been keeping up with our articles and you understand that the time has come to start producing original content. How do you do it?
Or maybe you haven’t been fully convinced yet that blogging for your small business is beneficial. Today we will look at why blogging could be good for your business, how to do it, and tips to optimize your blog.
Why Blogging is Important?
We’ve already covered the importance of SEO, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Marketing Automation. All of these marketing efforts are greatly affected by blogging.
A blog can help your SEO efforts by producing insightful content that relates to the keywords you are looking to rank for. For instance if I sell orange juice, I would likely write something to the tune of “The 8 different things you can do with orange juice”.
What this does for me from an SEO perspective is, it gives Google Bots the chance to crawl around my page and link my content with my business’ relevance to orange juice related keywords.
When we started blogging, particularly on topics which related more closely to digital marketing, we found we were suddenly ranking for keywords that we did not show up for before. Even if used only for SEO related gains for your business, the importance of blogging cannot be understated.
For content and social media blogging for your business can help redirect traffic to your website. Think of it as a more useful CTA (call to action) for your audience. You’ve taken the time to put pen to paper (or give yourself carpal tunnel syndrome) to publish some engaging information, now by publishing that on your social media and other forums for content, you will cause your audience to go to your page invigorated with purpose.
Blogging can also help give you a starting point to create your marketing automation strategy around. Having a blog helps you understand what is a realistic output for you. How much content you can see yourself putting out in a month and from there you can understand which days will be days you publish your blog posts, and which days will be borrowed content. Use Facebook insights and other tools to ascertain which days and times your audience is most active and engaged and publish your blog posts at those times.
(source: CrazyEgg)
How to Make a Blog?
So dive right into the question, how to make a blog, there are two main avenues to start. Do you make a blog on your current business website? Or do you make a blog on an outside site like wordpress? There are benefits to both.
From an SEO perspective, having an offsite blogging page can help increase Google’s interpretation of your businesses relevance in a decided field. The way that works is Google will understand that there is another site that links back to your business pages and social media and is relevant to your audience.
From a conversion/engagement perspective, having an onsite blog will help direct users to your online place of business which means they’re more likely to convert into hot leads for your business.
So to recap, the first decision you will have to make is whether to have an onsite or offsite blog. If you don’t already have a website, you can use Solomoto’s web-design service and have a professional help you get set up.
The next step is to check out your competitors blogs, what are they writing about? Which of their blog posts are getting the most traction? More specifically what keywords are they targeting?
Once you have an idea of what performs well within your market, write your blog with the related content. For more tips on how to optimize your written content click here
From there try to update your blog regularly. If you are understaffed, it is understable if you can’t produce a blog post per day, and chances are that if you are publishing daily without the support the blog quality will suffer. Aim for minimum once a month, ideally once a week.
The good news is that once you have a stable of published content you don’t have to stress over producing new content all the time. If you have content that can be updated (i.e “7 Facts about Something From 2016” will soon need to be updated for 2017), you can always updated it and publish and promote like new. Or you can repurpose your content in a number of ways to engage new users to join your audience.
That’s it as far as the how-to section is concerned. The only thing you have to worry about now is getting the ideas to put down in your blog. For that I would recommend sites like BuzzSumo and Feedly to see what articles are currently trending.
BuzzSumo and Feedly to see what articles are currently trending.
Blogging Tips
Blogging tips and tricks are a dime a dozen but successful blogging tips for your business are hard to come by. There are many experienced bloggers and an abundance of opinions, so for your reading pleasure and business profitability, I’ve tried to narrow it down to some tips I think will be most helpful for your blogging adventure.
Blogging Tips
Blogging tips and tricks are a dime a dozen but successful blogging tips for your business are hard to come by. There are many experienced bloggers and an abundance of opinions, so for your reading pleasure and business profitability, I’ve tried to narrow it down to 10 tips I think will be most helpful for your blogging adventure.
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Top performing blogs are usually around 1000 words in length.
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If you’re not writing you should be reading your competitor's blog and other related publications to increase your knowledge and range.
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Check the display of your blog on various computers, tablets and phones. Early on we noticed that Solomoto’s website would display properly on Apple computers, but for whatever reason my PC wouldn’t display the pages correctly.
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Create a schedule, flexible enough for writer’s block and other unforeseen occurrences, but regimented enough to keep you on task.
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Make headlines that will grab attention, but stay true to your keyword goals.
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Break up paragraphs into shorter more palatable units of information.
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Use a banner image to make sure you have written content visible before the fold and not just the image. (But always use an image!)
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Make the URL the primary keyword phrase you would like to rank for.
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Make sure your readers have an easy time digesting and navigating your blog. Just like food presentation has a profound effect on how people interpret the taste.
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Write blogs that impart wisdom to your readers. That is how you build a genuine following.
There you have it, the beginners guide to blogging for your business. Good luck and let us know about your blogging experiences!
Thanks for reading.