[Beginner – 103] How to Blog Effectively for Business
If you’re a business owner, you know the importance of marketing your business and improving your brand recognition. Additionally, you’re probably aware of the benefits of online marketing and know that an effective online marketing strategy can help to grow your business and attract new customers. In fact, there are currently over 130 million active blog readers in the United States, and 80% of customers believe that the information they read in a business blog to be true.
By keeping a blog that is effective, you’ll increase your search engine ranking, help people to discover your business, encourage self-promotion, and help to grow your business. Because a blog helps potential clients to learn about your business, having a blog can potentially scale your business incredibly fast. Additionally, companies that have blogs have more inbound links, which means more traffic and visitors, a.k.a. more profits. Therefore, If you want to acquire new clients, retain old ones, and grow your business, you need to know how to blog effectively for your business.
Write for Your Customers
When keeping a business blog, it’s important that you write content that’s created for and directed towards a target audience: your clientele. Whether they are the young or the old, men or women, sportsman or coffee-drinkers, keep a blog that is interesting from the perspective of the people who buy your product.
Create Relevant Content
Just as you should be writing for your customers, you should also be creating content that is interesting, informative, and relevant to your patrons. A great way to think about creating relevant content is by thinking of three to ten words that best describe your product, your brand name, your business history or goals. These words are called keywords. Effective keywords will not only help customers to find your blog and website when they’re searching you on the web through a search engine like Google, but they’ll also help you to keep your content focused by creating text that has these keywords as the focal point.
Be Original and Engaging
If you want to know how to blog effectively, another fact to remember is this: no one wants to read a blog that covers the exact same topic that they read about last week; rather, people want information that’s new and up-to-date, original, exciting, interesting, and engaging. When creating content and writing your blog, try to take a new spin on an old idea or present a product in an exciting fashion. Your blog can also be a great place for you to show off pictures of your product, tell a story about your business, share a great tale of customer interaction, encourage reviews and feedback, and promote contests or sales. By providing good and real examples about questions your frequently asked by clients, case studies about your customers, or your own real-life experiences, you’ll engage readers and provide them with valuable information.
Remain Consistent
Another important factor in creating a blog for business purposes is consistency—customers should be able to count on you to update your blog routinely. Pick a blog posting schedule and stick to it, whether it be once a day, once a week, or bi-monthly. By knowing when you’re going to post each month, you’ll give yourself time to plan for and create an interesting and engaging read each and every time you post.
Plan Ahead
Sitting down at the keyboard willy-nilly and typing whatever comes to mind that day isn’t advised. Instead, you should think of your blog as a long-term, constantly evolving, an important and essential marketing tool that should be planned for and strategized just like any other marketing tool would be. Your blog, if planned correctly, can be one of the most effective tools for your business. Therefore, think about topics, content, photos, and video way before you write them, and have a timeline of what’s being posted when. If something new comes up that you weren’t planning on blogging for, you can make adjustments as necessary; on the same token, if one topic falls through, you’ll have a backup blog topic planned and ready to be written and posted.
Use Photos, Graphics, and Videos
Unfortunately, as much as we’d all like to believe that the world loves to read every word we write, the truth is that most people skim content for attention grabbers. If you don’t have great key words (or even if you do), photos, graphics, and videos are awesome ways to gather your audience’s attention. Snap a shot of a great new product, add a graphic illustrating information about your business, or find or create a relevant video clip to add to your blog. Try to choose images and graphics that will make the reader want to read the surrounding text.
Keep it Simple and Neat
The words that you choose and the sentences that you construct to create your blog’s content should be simple, easy to understand, concise, and straightforward. Create easy to follow sentences, use proper punctuation and grammar, and make sure your spelling is correct. Even if you’re a great writer, have someone edit your blog for you before posting it; even the best writers make errors.
In addition to keeping your text simple and making sure it’s proofread, formatting is also an important topic to touch on. Use text and background colors that are easy to read, use heading and subheadings to keep information organized, and make sure that text is arranged in a fashion that’s easy to read and follow.
Promote Your Blog
After you’ve created the perfect content for your blog, make sure you promote it. Using business pages on Google, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, word of mouth, and online marketing ads are all great ways to drive traffic to your site and increase your blog views. Additionally, make sure you end each post with a “call to action,” or a request about what you want your readers to do next. Perhaps you want readers to download an offer, sign up for your newsletter, leave a comment, or subscribe to your blog. Whatever it is, make sure you let readers know what it is you expect from them; doing so will keep them engaged and help to increase your blog’s promotion.
Finally, make sure that your blog is complete with your business’s information, including a phone number, email address, and address—post this information somewhere on every page of your website for added effectiveness and user convenience.
By writing for your customers, creating relevant content, being original and engaging, remaining consistent, planning ahead, using photos and graphics, keeping it simple and neat, and promoting your blog, you’ll be well on your way to creating an effective blog for your business.