Starting a blog is a popular way many businesses use to increase their brand or for you to turn your hobby into residual income. With thousands of new blogs being started daily, you will need to find ways to gain a competitive advantage. Here are some of the ways you can improve your blog to help deliver the results you need for your business below.
Content Marketing
Instead of seeing your business as transactional, change your thought process to help add value to your clients and customers through useful content. By making content that is both educational and interactive, you gain the trust of your clients. Provide them valuable information that they need, not just what they want. Here are some ways you can use content marketing.
Create a Free e-Book
An ebook is a platform you can utilize to showcase what your business is all about. It can be a short summary of important information, data, or “how-to” that you are an expert. Make sure it is well written and provide in-depth information, not just fluff. Readers will see your expertise and experience, helping you keep or gain new clients.
Speak to professional digital marketing companies that can create an ebook for you if you’re new to this. This type of content marketing is becoming more popular on mobiles devices, as quick reads are something many commuters are looking for. This is also an excellent way to promote your business on social media as the post will be clickable and downloadable too.
Industry News
Business leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Ma frequently talk to industry conventions and conferences. Thanks to websites like YouTube, you can live stream your own public events and give your message a global platform. More consumers are watching YouTube and using streaming video services. You can reach potentially millions of people with a click of a button!
Create an effective content plan
Looks aren’t everything when it comes to a blog, it needs to have some substance to its content too. Planning your content in advance will help you to keep your blog updated regularly, and it can give some structure to your posts too. It’s possible to plan your blog content for the entire year if it helps you stay on track. Come up with posts that are relevant to your business and industry, as these are the topics your readers will be interested in the most.
Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work for one person. It’s a good idea to share the responsibility with other members of your team to keep the content fresh and to stop people from becoming fatigued with it. You can make it a regular part of your work program to ensure that content is updated regularly and that results are being monitored.
Hire the Right People
You have two options when it comes to hiring someone to develop your social media presence. You could bring somebody in to manage everything in-house. Alternatively, you could outsource your requirements to a digital advertising agency that will be able to help grow your presence using the right tools.
You can’t build a great social media strategy without great people who can help you maximize your return on your investment. You want to hire an agency or people that understand your demographic, can create great content and post often, can actively engage with your followers, and then analyze the analytics to help your social media campaign improve.
Analyze its Performance
How is your blog performing? Unless you conduct an evaluation into your page views, readership, etc., you won’t know how valuable your blog is to your business. Tracking your content’s success can help you recognize which posts are landing well with your visitors, which posts are drawing people to your website and whether or not they’re converting into sales.
You can use Google Analytics to help give you the information you need. A blog that’s performing poorly needs some serious work, while a blog that’s doing well will need further nurturing to help it reach even greater heights.
Give it a fresh design
Like your website, your blog should be eye-catching and attractive. Many businesses neglect their blogs when it comes to design. For many people, a blog post can be the entry point to your website, so those first impressions need to count. Get some inspiration from some of these fantastic blog designs to give you an idea of what to aim for.
Remember that any design you create needs to be suitable for use across a range of devices. Phones are becoming the most popular way to browse the internet, so if your content isn’t mobile-friendly, then you could find yourself missing out on a lot of readers.
Work on your SEO
One of the most valuable things about your business blog is its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) potential. Strong SEO is what helps your website get seen at the top of a search engine’s results, making web users more likely to visit your website.
Through the content you publish, you can maximize the effectiveness of your website’s SEO and hopefully draw in more visitors to the rest of your website. Some key pointers for making better use of SEO on your blog include:
- Using ‘long-tail’ keywords, such as questions or phrases individuals are likely to Google to lead to your business or content.
- Use headers that contain the keywords, which also help to break up your content.
- Using ALT text in your images (text that describes what the image is) to boost your SEO further.
- Don’t overstuff keywords – this is a past practice that search engines are starting to penalize. Keywords should be integrated naturally within content and shouldn’t stand out to the reader.
You should also focus on using links within your posts. By linking to external content, as well as links within your own website, you’ll be able to improve your SEO. Linking and providing sources makes your posts more credible and shows you’ve researched carefully.
Building backlinks is another important element to consider for your blog. Forming partnerships with those who will link back to your blog will boost your reader numbers, while also working wonders for your SEO too.
Publish different kinds of content
Today’s business blogs feature all kinds of content. As well as the written word, they’ll include images, videos, graphics, infographics and sound bites as a way to make the content richer. This allows you to great creative with the types of content you’re putting out.
People love to consume content. If you want to keep your customers happy and loyal, you need to give them things that enrich their experience with you. Some market research around the types of content they enjoy can help you come up with some innovative ideas that will appeal to your customers and keep them coming back for more.
Promote your posts
Putting a blog post together can take a lot of time and energy. Is it worth it if nobody sees your posts? Every blog post you put out deserves to be promoted. Some of the methods you can use to promote your blog posts include social media, guest posting and using your business’s mailing lists. Create a promotion plan around your blog to help attract readers and develop a following around it. It’s worth including a subscribe button so that people can receive automatic updates when a new post is published.
Creating a blog for your business has many benefits, but it will only be worth it if you do it right. Treat your blog as a marketing tool, and an opportunity to show your business in a different light. With the right approach and a great strategy, you can develop a business blog that really works for your business and helps to increase your bottom line. How is your business blog performing? Perhaps it’s time to unlock its full potential.