The Benefits of Blogging for your Business
There are many benefits of blogging to a business, including:
Increase traffic to your company website.
Extend the number of keywords people use to find you.
Take advantage of seasonal trends.
Increase your authority.
Increase the value of your website to your visitors.
Answer questions your customers ask frequently.
Save you time by giving you a ready-made response to standard emails.
Gain links for your site, improving SEO.
Increase customer engagement and trust.
Between recognizing the value of a blog for your business and having a valuable blog, though, there are quite a few steps. Many companies decide to blog, set up their blog, have someone write a few posts, and then give up, leaving an abandoned blog online as evidence of their failure. How can you avoid this?
How to Get the Most Out of Your Blog
The opportunity is yours for the taking if you know what to do. First, consider your customers’ most common questions and challenges— and how your business can answer or solve them. Don’t fish with the wrong bait.
These are the best kind of topics when you are blogging for your business. They not only bring your customers to your site but also set you up as a trusted resource for their needs. Blogs enhance your credibility and authority in your field and play a customer service/experience type of role. And most importantly, when you deliver useful blogs, this can help you meet your business objectives.
How do you do this? It would help if you wrote about exciting things and converted your audience. Get their attention, provide information and solutions, and:
Always create a lead-generating call to action in every blog post.
This can be implemented in a variety of ways. On the page (or a click-through to a separate landing page), set up an offer of additional valuable content where potential customers need to provide their essential contact information. Consider offering free trials, webinars, eBooks, fact sheets, or white papers. Solid prospects for your sales team will continue to build as you blog.
Indeed, not everyone who reads your blog will become a lead. But you can have an ongoing goal to increase your visitor-to-lead conversion rate.
Know what else you can accomplish? The establishment and strengthening of your reader’s relationship with your sales team. If you can consistently publish valuable content penned by sales team members or leaders (or their ghostwriters), this provides a good launchpad when leads are generated. Do you have a potential webinar star on your team? Have you delved into the eBook arena yet? If not, you could miss many opportunities to increase your sales.
Use Imagery when Blogging for Business
What you say in your business blogs is the heart of your content. But it is not the only thing that is important. Imagery, in this ever-growing world of visual communications, is another powerful tool in your marketing toolbelt. When used strategically, your imagery can be an excellent way to promote a connection with your audience while representing your brand and the specific topic you are writing about in the blog.
It draws your audience in from the first click and helps them to understand your topic better. Do you know what else it can do? Imagery acts as an attention-getter to increase time on the page (Which raises the possibility of a conversion). The last thing you want is to have your readers quickly get bored and leave your website.
Another benefit of using imagery is that it can increase user satisfaction. Whether attempting to inspire, excite, or show that you are the solution to their problem, choose imagery that is relevant to your audience and topic to give them the experience they are looking for on your website. If you do it right, you’ll have them coming back for more.
Create Topic Clusters
When developing a content strategy, topic clusters must be part of the conversation. A topic cluster is a page (or blog) that provides in-depth answers to a specific question that links back to your main pillar page. They are not only important for SEO, but they also make you appear as an expert in your industry.
For example, suppose you are a financial services company. In that case, you can create topic clusters for your blogs focusing on common questions or problems people ask when preparing for their financial future. Topics like “What should I do with my stocks in a bear market?” or “Are ETFs right for me?” can include links to your pillar page in your list of services.
When blogging for your business, using the topic cluster model can help you have more organized and comprehensive content, increase the speed of your content production (once you have your pillar page), and give your blog the authority of a topic your audience is looking for online.
It will also bring your targeted audience to your website. Utilizing keywords in the topic cluster model, you can enhance your SEO with each new blog post. Each blog builds on the previous one to bring more and more traffic to your pillar page, boosting your lead generation capabilities and your opportunities to convert your readers to buyers.
Be businesslike with your blog.
Approach a company blog as you would any other project at your business strategically. Determine your goals and your resources before you begin. Do you have someone in the company who can write the company blog? This needs to be someone who can write, certainly. Still, it should also be someone who can develop ideas and information regularly, edit and proofread correctly, and be trusted not to divulge sensitive information or too much personal data for your industry.
When you identify a good candidate for a company blogger or a set of people who can share the responsibility, consider whether this will be a significant added responsibility that requires additional compensation, whether some of the staffer’s current tasks should be diverted, and what kind of oversight will be necessary. Putting blogging duties on a regular schedule is likely to be most successful since blogging whenever there’s free time tends to turn into that abandoned blog mentioned above.
Engage your staff.
Once you have chosen a blogger or blogging service, encourage all staff to keep their eyes open for blogging opportunities. Your company’s successes, accomplishments, new products, and staff should be mentioned in the blog. So should helpful information for your customers, exciting events, and news in your industry.
If you have multiple staff authors for your blog, consider having author pages or signature paragraphs so visitors to your website will feel more connected to “Jenny from Accounting” or “Brian from IT.” Encourage those staffers to link to their blog posts on LinkedIn or other sites they frequent.
Make the most of your company blog.
Optimize your blog for the search engines, too. Ensure that your keywords are used regularly, not only in the posts but also in the titles. Use those features if you use a blogging platform with categories and tags. Use alt text with your images, and be sure to compress all the pictures and videos you use so your site won’t be slower to load.
You can send your blog posts to your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and other profiles and pages. You can link to them in your company newsletter, too. Using the content in this way will extend the ROI of your blog.
Finally, give your blog time. Use your website analytics to ensure that people visit, but don’t expect immediate results. Remember that good blog posts will continue to bring visitors to your website for years, even if those early posts don’t have a large audience initially.
The post Blogging for Your Business appeared first on Data Fidelity Software.