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If your business has an online presence, or needs one, the simple blog is a great way of extending your reach.
The content that appears on your website can be the key to better results in the search engines and can be your main tool for boosting your business’s audience. Quality content that real people engage with is critically important for effective digital marketing in 2019.
A blog is the perfect way to keep regular content flowing through your website. What’s more, it should be an ongoing priority for most businesses with a digital presence. While you can outsource blog writing, you can often benefit far more by writing and creating your own. See our three simple steps for kickstarting your blog.
1. Understand That a Blog Can Help
Before launching your blog, it’s worth understanding in more detail how a blog could transform your website and business. That’s because it will:
Drive More Traffic to Your Website
From search engine queries to social media shares, the blog posts that provide real value and answers to consumer questions will improve your site traffic.
Develop Brand Loyalty
Your blog should have a focus on inciting interactions so that customers can turn to your brand for advice and answers. Comments and discussions can foster trust in your products and services, encouraging customers to return.
Build Industry Leadership
Your blog should showcase your knowledge about your sector. Therefore, be sure to discuss and analyze any relevant news. This will also go a long way toward building trust with your audience. The more you can showcase your expertise, the more likely your audience will trust your brand.
Give Your Business an SEO Boost
If you use keywords that are relevant to your business, your site’s performance will dramatically improve on all of the major search engines. Therefore, make sure you know what your keywords are and integrate them naturally into your blog posts.
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2. Get Started with Your Blog
You should do some research initially around the form and scheduling of your writing. Max Your Web’s Jonathon Monk provides some more actionable tips in this helpful post. This post is a good place to start and will give you good grounding and a foundation to build on.
However, at some point, you’re going to need to start writing. First, you will want to curate at least forty pieces of content so that you can distribute them consistently while continuing to create more. This is so you never run out of content to post and can keep the quality high.
Ideally, you want your blog to be in one of the following formats:
Newsjacking
This is where you take news and write about it so that your audience can understand its effect on your business, product, or sector. This can be a good way to develop ideas for content. Also, it has the added benefit of being shareable and easy to find. Use hashtags to promote your blog, and you’ll expand your audience reach significantly. Moreover, your audience will begin to view you an industry leader.
How-to Guides
This can often be the bulk of your content. Instructional blog posts about how to use your product or advising your audience about tips and tricks that are relevant to your business can be as in-depth as you like. This can also double as evergreen content.
Storytelling
You don’t have to write a book, but your audience will be interested in the behind-the-scenes stories of your business. If you have an employee who has just won a sales award, for example, or you have just invested in new office premises, your audience will be interested. Discuss your business as if your audience is invested in you, and their loyalty to your brand will only grow stronger.
Listicles
Buzzfeed might do many things wrong, but they have perfected the art of the list. Lists can be easy content to write. And as long as they remain even tangentially related to your business, you can generate any number of blog posts using the same data source. Consider looking at stats related to your sector, too.
Multimedia
Your blog doesn’t have to be all about the written word. Infographics, photographs, and even video should all be used. Having a variation means that your audience will be able to absorb your content in the way they prefer.
While some people will prefer to read a 500-word article, others will be more inclined to watch a video for a few minutes instead. By varying your content types, you can generate multiple versions of your blog posts. For example, one blog post can be converted into an infographic for a separate piece of content, and you could then record a video presentation of that same content.
3. Know Your Audience
The single most important thing that you can do to make sure that your blog is providing value to you and your audience is to know exactly who your audience is.
When writing your business plan, you will have identified your most likely customers. It’s vital that you have a constant awareness of your audience demographic. Different age groups, genders, and interests will determine your brand’s tone of voice and will dictate the blog post style and content you create.
The more that you learn about and understand your audience, the easier it will be to create content that they will want to read, share, and discuss.
A Blog Will Bolster Your Company’s Presence
Take the time to develop a strong blogging strategy and your website will grow stronger. Businesses that neglect content fall behind their competitors. So if you want to stay ahead of the game, it’s time to fire up Word and start typing.
Have on ongoing list of ideas to discuss in your blog posts, and you’ll never run out of content that delights and provides benefits to your business, your audience, and your bottom line.
