Isn't Blogging For Influencers and Journalists?
Simple answer, no! It is easy to see blogging as an activity for people such as influencers, journalists, hobbyists, or people with nothing better to do! That is an old-fashioned and blinkered view of blogging.
Blogging is one of the most successful forms of content marketing any business can undertake. In fact, according to Hubspot, blogs are one of the three main forms of media used in businesses' content marketing strategies in 2020. In a perfect world, every business should have a blog.
Blogs may be quietly disguised under different headings, such as "News", "Journal", or "Tips", but in whatever form they take, blogging is big for your business. Later on, we will take a look at what content successful blogs use to build an audience and drive traffic to products or services.
Blogs Help Increase Traffic To Your Website
Blogs are the way to encourage new traffic to your website. Every new blog post you create means fresh new content on your website. The search engines, during their regular crawls, see that new content is being generated on a regular basis, which shows them that your website is alive and well. If the content is good and authoritative, you have a good chance of being ranked in the search results for your long tail keywords. This in turn gives your website better visibility and the opportunity that new visitors will visit your website.
Once visitors have seen your blog posts and assuming they like your content, they are likely to visit the website time and again. In other words, your blog gives people a reason to visit your website.
People who keep coming back to your website are buying into your business or brand through their engagement. They are thus also more likely to enter your sales funnel by signing up for your latest tips or news.
Your Blog Will Help You Win Backlinks
A healthy website will always be looking to pick up quality backlinks to help increase its perceived authority. Quality backlinks are not easy to come by without a content marketing strategy. If you can make your blog produce high-quality content which is authoritative and valuable to people you will soon find other websites linking to your content.
Of course, you will find that you are approached by some companies asking for a link from your blog post to their website in return for a link back from their own website. This is all fine and good (so long as the other website is of sufficient quality and suitability). However, getting backlinks which are not reciprocal is a lot more valuable to your website in the eyes of search engines, like Google.
Backlink strategies are a topic for another day but bear in mind that your blog is one of your most powerful methods of encouraging backlinks to your website.
Your Blog Adds Personality To Your Business
The one thing many businesses struggle with is managing to portray a consistent personality to their business. Too many businesses are faceless entities, devoid of personality.
Your blog is an effective way to add personality to your business through your website. You can set a consistent tone through your content, which is suited to the nature of your business and your audience. Your style could be chatty and informal, or it could be formal and to the point. For example, a business in the healthcare or legal sector will probably want to use a formal and to-the-point tone to underline their expertise and authority in their field. Conversely, a retail business with a predominantly young audience will most likely choose to take a more informal and colloquial tone in its blog.
Whatever the field of your business, finding the right tone for your blog will help hugely with positive engagement from your audience.
Aside from the tone of the blog, you can add personality to your business by providing useful information and tips for free. Alternatively, you can introduce members of staff in your blog posts and let them tell their stories about how they help make your business a great place to work and keep your customers happy.
Use Your Blog As A Pre-Emptive Sales Tool
A blog can be used as an effective sales tool, so long as you do not try the "hard sell". We have seen successful blogging sales campaigns where the business has used the blog as a subtle, pre-emptive sales tool.
In this scenario, the business took a two-pronged strategy through a series of blog posts. The first strategy pre-empted questions the customer were likely to ask about their products. The second strategy was to talk about how their products could be used in different environments or scenarios, which may have been outside of the perceived norm for how the product was normally used.
The strategy worked well and helped drive traffic through to their sales pages where leads and sales increased substantially through that channel.
Become The Industry Experts Through Your Blog
You can use your blog to outwit your competitors and quickly become your industry's primary expert and authority.
This can be achieved by producing quality content on a range of topics which are key to your sector or niche. Providing authoritative and free information is a good way to go. You could effectively turn an area of your blog into a knowledgebase for visitors to use as the go-to place for trusted information about your area of business expertise.
Over time you could go a step further and compile your posts into an eBook which is available for free download in exchange for the visitor signing up for your newsletter or "tips".
Blog posts of this nature will additionally help your business by making it the expert in its field. So long as all the information you write about is correct and true, you will soon have a good archive of useful information about your sector. If your business is in a sector which has the ability to affect people's live substantially (finance, healthcare, legal, etc.) building up authority will help you fully comply with Google's "E A T" (Expertise Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) guidelines. More on "E A T" in a future post!
Build A Knowledgebase With Your Blog
In the previous section, we discussed turning an area of your blog into a knowledgebase. With careful planning, you can expand on this and create a two-way flow of traffic. A good place to start with building a knowledgebase is by harnessing your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section(s).
FAQs are used, as it says on the tin, to answer questions you expect your visitors or customers to regularly ask you. Why not then create an article about each question in the form of a blog post? In the FAQ section, you can add a link to the post and vice-versa, ending your visitors to different parts of your website for all the information they need.
Knowledgebases can also take the form of "How To" areas of your website. "How To" areas can work really well for tradesmen's websites, as you can give free step-by-step instructions on how to complete relatively simple tasks, whilst promoting your business and providing your audience with useful FREE information, which they will most likely revisit time and again.
Examples of businessses where "How Tos" can be very profitable are:
- Electricians
- Plumbers
- Car Mechanics
- Florists
- Hairdressers
- Make-up Artists
Use Your Blog To Enhance Your Social Media Campaigns
Engaging your social media audience can be similar to engaging your blog's audience. In both cases compelling content is crucial to retain attention. Why not try to combine the two?
Create your blog posts and then promote them on your social media channels, encouraging them to click through to read the posts on your website.
Integrate Your Blog Posts To Your Email Campaigns
Another method of publicising your blog posts is to link them to your email campaigns. Many small businesses use Mailchimp as their mailing list of choice, due its ability to very easily integrate to a WordPress website.
Mailchimp has a campaign feature where when you publish a new blog post, Mailchimp will automatically pick the new post up through your website's RSS feed and at a pre-determined time it will email your post to your mailing list. This is a fantastic way to automate the wider distribution of your blog to your mailing lists.
Use Your Blog To Promote Your Services or Products
Your blog is a great place for you to promote your products or services. We urge caution at this point as the last thing you want to do is push your wares with a hard sell. No, that is a bad idea!
The way to promote your products and services is to write informational articles about the general topic, going into whatever depth you need to. Within the post you can add links back to your own products or services. This has the advantage of enticing your readers to click on the links, as well as helping you create useful and profitable internal links. As I am sure you know, a good internal linking strategy is important for your SEO strategy.
Keeping Your Website Up-To-Date
As we mentioned early in this post, blogs help enormously to keep your website up-to-date and fresh. New blog posts tell both your visitors and Google that your website, and therefore business, is active and working hard to grow your business.
Fresh content will be picked up in the search engine results and will help keep your audience engaged with your business, especially if you can further promote your blog through mailing list automation and social media cross-posting.
Blogging Strategies For Businesses
Getting started with your business's blog needn't be daunting. Put into place a robust strategy and your blog could be working hard for you within a short space of time.
Who Are You Writing For?
Before you even get started with your blog, you need to determine who you are writing for. In other words, what is your target audience?
If you don't do your research at this point, you will inevitably end up creating a bitty blog which appeals to nobody at all. Your long-term strategy should be to create a blog which has a consistent theme and keeps a loyal audience which longingly awaits your next instalment!
Unless your website is brand-new, you should have a wealth of data on your past audience from your Google Analytics and CRM data. This data includes things such as:
- The primary locations of your audience (UK, USA, Europe - down to regional or city level)
- The average age of your audience (are you to write for a young and trendy, or a more mature and professional audience)
- The sector your audience tends to work in (your CRM database will give you insight into this)
- The level of seniority of your audience (are you dealing with consumers, mid-level professionals, or senior management?) The tone of your posts will need to be attractive to the audience
- The income bracket of your audience (this will dictate how you promote your goods and services)
- Your audience's interests (will your products or services be attractive to the audience?)
Research these areas and you will establish which section of your overall audience your blog should be pitched to.
The Tone of Your Blog
Now that you have defined your audience, you need to work out the language you should use to engage with it. Does your blog need to sound formal, professional and authoritative, or should it encourage a more informal style, though still with professionalism and authoritativeness?
For example, a solicitor's or medical blog will use a very different tone from a local retail outlet catering to younger adults. Think of your audience and write for them.
Plan Your Content
It is all too easy to get excited about your new blog and to just start writing! What about continuity and strategy though? Your blog needs a content strategy to bring a natural flow to it week-by-week.
Think of your blog as a film. The film tells a story and progresses in a natural way so the viewers are engaged and understand what is happening. Your blogging strategy should be similar to this. Write down a plan for your posts, starting with your first post. From there, take your audience down a natural progression of themes and topics.
If you want to think of it another way, imagine your blog as a course where a lesson is released each week and when one module is completed, you move on to the next one.
Blog Post Content
Make your post content interesting and something you or your peers would be happy to open and read. Although it is not always possible, use images, infographics, videos, quizzes, and slide shows in your posts.
Interactive blogs tend to lead to better conversion rates.
How Often Should I Post On My Blog?
How often you post on your blog will depend upon a number of factors.
- Do you have a dedicated content writer?
- How much time do you have to write posts without neglecting your day-to-day business?
- Do you have a big enough range of topics to post very frequently?
- Will your audience want to be flooded with new posts?
Most small businesses do not have the infrastructure to run a full-time blog. This means the business owner of a member of staff has to fit blog writing around their daily tasks. With an average blog taking the best part of half a working day (3½ hours) to write,this can be a significant chunk of the working week.
With this in mind, we advise that if you are starting out with a blog, try to post one high quality blog every week on a regular schedule.
Analyse Your Blog's Performance
Now that your blog is live and kicking, you will want to understand how it performs. Are visitors engaging with the posts? Are they clicking through the links within the posts? Is your blog audience growing?
All of these things can be analysed using your Google Analytics account. You should not expect to see rocketing numbers coming to your blog instantly, but over the medium term, you should start to see a definite upward trend in the traffic to your blog. If this is not the case, you may want to revisit your blogging strategy and content to find out why it is not attracting visitors!
Key statistics you will want to analyse in Google Analytics are:
- Which pages or posts are your visitors landing on?
- How long are visitors spending on each page?
- How long are visitors spending on the entire website?
- Are visitors landing on your blog posts?
- Are visitors navigating to your blog posts from core website pages?
- Where are your visitors coming from (direct, organic search, social media or ads)?
- Are your visitors using your calls to action (CTAs) to convert to a lead or customer?
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