Launching a Successful Blog For Your Business
Starting a successful blog can be an effective way to attract new customers. All it comes down to is creating value for your readers. If you put the work and creative energy into your blog, it can help your business down the road.
A great aspect to blogging is once you create a great piece of content, the search engines will bring you traffic to that page for the lifetime that page is relevant. So it’s worthwhile to start planting these seeds of growth (blog articles) for your business.
Creating Exceptional Content
Many corporate business blogs will pump out boring content that doesn’t get much attention. Articles like “XYZ company’s fifth birthday office party” and “A day in the life of an XYZ employee” do NOT do much for attracting new customers. However, creating compelling blog posts of interest can be tricky. Let’s look at how to create a list of topics that will win you new customers.
What are the common questions a customer will ask your business?
Answering common questions in specific, detailed posts makes great content. Ask your sales team and customer service what people ask about most. You could also try using surveymonkey.com and ask past customers for new topics.
“How-To” Content
If you want to start making content right away, the easiest blog posts to tackle are “How-To” posts. Simply educate your customer on how to do something that is commonly asked. For example, Home Depot does a great job of providing “how-to” content that helps its target customers maintain and beautify their homes. When you visit, you’ll find posts like:
How to Install a Garage Door Opener
How to Operate a Woodchipper
How to Install a Garbage Disposal
It is for the same reason we write blog posts like this – How to Launch A Successful Blog For Your Business! It’s valuable content we know businesses want to know.
Building compelling and valuable content will help you become the online authority of your subject matter. The beauty of this is building trust with online visitors to convert them into lifelong paying customers.
Use a lot of clean images and diagrams to help communicate in your blog posts. And if you are up for a challenge, try video blogging to increase your value.
Make Sure To Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines
Before you get too far into blogging, you’re going to want to make sure that you optimize for search engines like Google, Bing and others.
Make sure you consider the following when optimizing your blog:
Title Tags – Title tags are the most important aspect of on-page SEO. First, you’re going to want to make sure that they are ON every page of your blog. You can look for the title tag in your source code. View the source code of all your web pages and search for “<title>”. If it’s in your source code than your page has a title.
Meta Descriptions – The meta description is used in search to show a page description for each result. Look for the code: <meta name=”description” content=> in your source code. Again, if you find this in your source code then your page has a description. Make sure to check and see if there is a description present in the meta description. Hopefully, you see a few sentences describing the page.
Block Duplicate Content – When it comes to on-page SEO, make sure to limit repeating the same content on pages. Your blog home page should not contain the entire textual content of each post. Your settings should only show snippets on the blog home page. Also, make sure to block comment pages in the robots.txt file. These pages can be a duplicate of your blog posts.
Check Your Text Navigation – Search engines find their way to content by following other links. Always make sure you can get to the blog from your homepage with text links. If you can, so can the search engines.
Frequency
If you are going to blog, it is something that you should commit to on a regular basis. The more you write, the more the search engines will crawl your website. Additionally, search engines will check more frequently which can raise the relevance and authority of your website. This could lead to increased traffic.
The number one mistake everyone makes is starting off strong and then completely stopping. It is important to keep on going as it may take many months before your main source of internet traffic comes from blogging. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses are not patient enough to wait for the impact on their website.
Find ways to motivate your blog efforts! One way you can look at this, is to treat your blog as a customer resource guide rather than another item on your business checklist. If you create posts that solve your customer’s problems, you can use your content to send to customers or employees with questions.
Promotion
The best way to promote your blog posts is through email marketing which you can build with a sign-up box prominently displayed on your website. Hopefully you’ve been building your list organically, because buying marketing lists have proven to be ineffective compared to sharing your content with those who have opted in voluntarily.
Be sure to routinely post your content to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin on the day your content is published and continue to repost it from time to time as you build your audience. Take note on what time of the day most of your social media followers are logged on so you can increase your chance of them seeing the content.
You can also promote your content just by linking to other articles in reference or citing information. You can reach out to these authors and ask them if they can share your content with their audience. Surprisingly, you’ll find that many authors you cite would be happy to share your content too.
If you have the time and appreciation for blogging, we highly recommend it. It’s one of those marketing strategies that can potentially bring your biggest share of business. It can be a win/win when you build authority and genuinely help people with content they can truly appreciate. If you are unsure how to get started, contact us and we will provide step-by-step guidance on everything you need to know.