Are you running a small business? Have you started business blogging? If not, start it right away! It's worth the time and effort.
If you want to show up as an authority in your niche, you need to start solving your customer's problems by educating them at every stage of their buying journey.
How?
Start your business blog.
It is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to boost your inbound marketing efforts.
The result?
You will build trust with your customers and entice more of the targeted audience in just a few months.
Yes, it only takes a few months to make a business blog a hit if you know the right strategy to execute it.
Here I am going to share some simple yet effective tips to start a business blog and execute it like a pro.
What's the deal?
You will get organic traffic, more leads, and a boost in your sales.
Sounds fair? Let's read it!
What Is Business Blogging?
Simply put, it is a section on your site where you put entities named as blog posts to inspire, educate, inform, and sway your audience with useful and informative content. It gives your business an identity in the industry and build credibility.
The more useful and enticing content you post, greater will be your website's visibility. A business blog will help you attract the right customers who are interested in what you are selling and ultimately buy from you.
How Blogging Helps Your Business?
The sole purpose of a business blog is to entice visitors to your site. It's that simple!
The more readers you have on your blog, the more likely you will get a boost in conversions and sales.
Here are some statistics that will justify the importance of blogging for business.
- 80% of e-commerce marketers use blog posts as part of their marketing strategy.
- Companies that blog tend to get 97% more organic traffic to their sites.
- Blogs have been rated as the 5th most reliable source currently for authentic online information.
- b2C companies that blog consistently generate 88% more leads per month than those that do not.
- 77% of internet users read blogs.
- 60% of buyers say blog posts play a vital role in the buying process.
- More than half of content marketers use blog content to boost their marketing efficiency.
How To Run A Better Business Blog
No matter if you are running your business on a small scale or large scale. With the help of business blogging, you are one step closer to achieving your goals. The next step is to craft a successful business blog.
Best business blogging practices can do so much for your business with its endless benefits. If you are ready to start blogging now, here are 15 tips for successful business blogging from the blogging experts:
1. Find A Unique Angle
Business blogging is currently the most competitive niche you can get into. So if you plan to start now, it will be critical to find a unique angle that has not been covered by the bloggers already. You could begin this by writing on a specific type of business.
Writing a business blog focused on a specific geographic area or economic region might be a better approach to start.
Starting a podcast to compliment your blog is another unique way to venture into the world of blogging. You can begin by interviewing local community and business leaders for your podcast. This way, they will help you promote the blog and podcast because it will be in their interest. If your content is right, you will have a devoted following of listeners and readers in no time.
2. Have A Strategy
Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Therefore, having a strategy is crucial when building a successful business blog. To accomplish this, set aside time to formulate a formal plan, outlining:
● What goals do you want to achieve from this blog, and who is your audience?
● How frequently will you be posting to your blog?
● What topic do you want to cover?
● How will you promote your blog article?
● Who will supervise your blogging activity and be in charge of uploading content?
Blogging is a time-consuming task, so it is essential to have a clear idea of your goals and aims. Keep tracking your team so that it stays on the right path.
3. Frequent Activity Is The Key
A half-hearted blog is as bad as no blog at all. The companies that give search engines frequent content to crawl reap the SEO benefits of blogging.
There are no defined rules for posting frequency. Set your frequency, whether you post once a week or every other day. Post your blogs on a consistent schedule to let the readers know when to expect new content.
4. Organization Helps
A successful business blog tip is to stay regimented. When you are working on the blog, and your income depends on this blog's success, staying regimented is incredibly essential. The blogging tools help you stay organized and are all free.
5. Build Backlinks
Crafting a successful business blog is a challenging task these days. You compete against thousands of other business blogs in all niches, including small business blogging, dedicated entrepreneurs, and global corporations with vast resources.
Besides creating consistently unique content and promoting your social media following. You need to build high-quality backlinks. The backlinks from well-known websites of your niches will improve your Google ranking. In this way, you generate the necessary drive to compete in a cut-throat and competing market.
6. Find The Right Tone
The right tone is the language or tone of voice that your visitors understand and find easy to digest. It is one of the most challenging tasks to adopt the right style while also getting straight to the point. People read business blogs to find quick answers to their problems. It is why most blog articles begin with 'how-to,' so your must posts are clear and not too much waffle.
7. Passion Is The Key
The critical secret to building a successful business blog is- you have to be so in love with teaching and helping people that you would write it up. No matter if it brings profit to your business or not.
It is that simple! If you don't have this kind of drive and passion, unfortunately, you can not write enough to break through the clutter.
8. Think Like A Customer
Write what people want to read. Though it sounds obvious, very few people manage to write on the topics that readers find enticing. Here are a few proven ways to find out what people are interested in:
- Do initial research, and see what kind of blog articles are getting a lot of engagement on social forums. For instance, if an item has hundreds or thousands of shares on Facebook, it is a good sign that many readers are interested in the content of that article.
- Do your keyword research using several tools that tell you how many times a specific keyword has been searched.
9. Write Content with Your Audience
Over time, blogging has become a vital tool for businesses to promote search traffic and expertise. Social media has become a platform to meet people and give visibility to new entrepreneurs and worthwhile ideas.
Blogging is a pivotal way to build community. It is suggested to write with your audience instead of writing for them.
To accomplish that, encourage your partners to contribute and leverage your content. As a result of this approach, you will be paid off collectively. If you are blogging, don't just make it for your company, make it collectively for the community. If your community's goals are your prime priority, you will find the benefits that will accrue to you too.
10. Choose Quality Over Quantity
Filling the white space with fluffy articles useless to your readers will do no good to your business. Therefore, ensuring the consistent flow of valuable content is very important. There should be a purpose for each blog post. For instance, if your blog title has promised the reader '5 expert tips to keep your house clean,' make sure you have delivered this.
11. Add Value
Whatever is your blog strategy, the cornerstone objective of any business blog should be to add value for readers. Add value means being useful, informative, and keeping self-promotion to a minimum. Salesman pitch will drive away customers and unravel your team's effort into getting them onto your blog. Writing valuable and informative content that provides useful information will enhance conversion rates.
12. Shake Up The Structure Of Your Blog Posts
Thin content, such as pages with minimal and vague copy, has no value to the reader. Similarly, an endless page of monotonous content puts readers off before they even begin.
Let's be honest. We all take a glance over the text, skim through crucial points to make sure if reading it is worth the time or not.
Using a readable format is equally important to write a great copy. Make good use of paragraphs to section your copy into digestible chunks.
Add explicit subheadings to highlight the key points that will let your readers know that your post is worth reading. And it will compel them to stay on your page till the last word.
After research, the blog experts have concluded that the blog posts that contain images receive 94% more views. Breaking up your copy with videos, photos, or infographics to illustrate your content is highly recommended.
13. Write for Humans not Machines
Keyword research is significant if you want to make sure you are writing about the things your visitors are looking for. However, never settle for your content's low quality by cramming in countless keywords to please search engines. This is more likely to harm your business than good by getting you penalized by Google.
Writing flowy content in natural sentence structures and using simple vocabulary that is easy to understand will enhance your user's experience. It is something that Google holds in high regard.
14. Don't Feel Ashamed In Resharing Old Content
Make your content more noticeable by sharing it more than once. Once your blog is finalized and you start exploring page analytics. You will find numerous evergreen blog articles that are still performing well. And drive a considerable amount of organic traffic, long after they were posted.
After analyzing attribution reports, it is observed that most of the traffic is driven by historical blog content that was posted months or even years back. So keep bringing your old content into the spotlight indeed makes sense.
Resharing old content is an excellent way of ensuring a valuable piece of content acquires plenty of opportunities to shine. Always make sure to refresh with relevant and factually correct information.
15. Roundups
Roundups are an excellent way to create top-notch quality content that readers will like to share and link to. To promote roundups, create a mailing based on related content and send out a mail merge letting the cyber world know about your new blog post.
The benefits of blogging are uncountable. Yet it is by no means a quick fix. Building and maintaining a valuable blog for both your business and your customers is a craft that takes time. And its rewards are certainly worth the investment, and it continues to give your business a positive impact in the long run.
Benefits Of Blogging For Business
If you want to drive organic traffic to your site consistently, entice new customers, establish loyalty with current customers, and become a brand leader in your niche.
No matter if you are blogging for small businesses or large-scale businesses. The main motive is to consistently publish informative, well-written articles crafted with strategy and customer engagement in mind.
Here are nine significant benefits that show the importance of business blogging:
1. Drives Organic Traffic
Every time you publish a business blog, it is one more indexed page added to your website. It means you have one more opportunity to appear in search engines and boost organic traffic to your website. It is one more clue that your website is active, and they should check in frequently to see what new content surfaces.
2. Convert Organic Traffic Into Leads
Now that you have lots of organic traffic coming to your website through your blog posts. You have an excellent opportunity to convert this traffic into quantifiable leads. Every business blog you publish is another indexed page. Each blog post is a new chance to generate new leads. Add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post you write.
The call-to-action often leads to offers like free eBooks, free factsheets, free whitepapers, free trials, free webinars, r any content asset for which a reader would be willing to exchange their information.
3. It Establishes Authority
When you are frequently creating content that helps your target audience. It will establish you as an authority in your customer's eyes. It is a convenient and professional tool for Sales and Services professionals.
4. Produces Long-Term Results
Business blogging turns out to be fruitful in attracting customers and leads nicely into the future- sometimes the years. Researches have proved that more than three-quarters of your views are directed from older posts. It is why it is a great practice to refresh your older posts with newer links and recent data. Sometimes all it takes is a few more tweaks, and the blog regains its effectiveness and continues to bring qualified leads.
5. Boosts SEO
Search engines provide informative and valuable content to searchers. Blogging frequently gives Google and other search engines fresh content to index. In this way, you get the opportunity to plug-in all the essential keywords in your content. It enhances your visibility on search engine result pages.
6. Develop Relationship With Potential And Existing Customers
Blogging enables you to connect with your website visitors. End your blogs with a question mark to keep the conversation going or allow the feedback and comments. You can also respond to your reader's comments to develop a relationship of trust. And gain valuable insight into what your readers are looking for.
7. Provide Value To Visitors
The most significant advantage of business blogs is that it provides valuable content for free. It offers solutions to many problems of its readers. Of course, your products or services will be the soul of solutions you provide in your post, but subtly.
If your blog posts are nothing more than product promotions or service pitches, don't bother blogging. Readers won't be interested!
8. Create Opportunities For Sharing
Business blogging helps you get discovered through social media. Every time you publish blog posts, it enables people to share on social networks -- LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook. It exposes your content to different audiences that may not know you yet.
Business blogs keep your social media presence going. It strengthens your social reach and drives new visitors to your website via social channels. It is quite a symbiotic relationship.
9. Build Your Network Within Your Niche
When most businesses think of blogging, their prime focus is their customers. Every niche has numerous valuable and trustworthy blogs. They all feature frequent and consistent blogging. You can bet these are the leading ones with the most significant strategic partnership and client portfolios.
Many companies consistently track the content their competitors are posting. Following the blog, feed is the easiest way to see what others are doing. But it also establishes substantial networking benefits with others within the same niche.
Many of such relationships can result in:
- Additional linked or shared blogs
- Invites to industry events
- Even entire buyouts of companies.
10. Builds Credibility
When a business successfully builds trust, its reputation spreads quickly. It is wisely said, 'When a trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.' Regular and consistent blogging is the simplest yet gradual way to build the trust of your readers. Eventually, it leads them to become customers. Most likely a lifetime customer, depending upon valuable content flow.
Business Blogging Ideas
Business blogging has proved to be a great way to draw customers' attention and lead qualified conversions. A successful business blog doesn't sell. Instead, it convinces customers why they should choose you over your competitors.
There are countless business blogging examples out of which few are shortlisted here:
1. Share the success story of your customers, especially how it relates to your products and services.
2. Make a list of the best tools, software, apps for business owners in your country.
3. Record a video series to demonstrate how to do something.
4. Provide a tip sheet, free template, or checklist that is useful to your visitors.
5. Convey authority by talking about the trends and how things are involved in the industry.
6. Provide a comparison test by comparing two or more related products or services.
7. Make podcasts by recording interviews with experts, or give a few useful tips.
8. List down the people to follow on Twitter.
9. Compile a list of the most popular posts on your blog.
10. Go off-topic and share something unrelated to the content you post.
11. Hire a professional content writing agency to outsource useful and engaging blog posts.
12. Don't underestimate the power of white space. It can make your blog more visually appealing and user-friendly to engage readers and hook them to your page for longer.
13. Use more images! Keep it simple and clear.
14. Give your readers what they want.
Conclusion
Blogging can be a good way to skyrocket your marketing campaigns if done right. You can't get results if you don't prepare a proper content strategy.
If you are facing any issues in handling the blog section of your site, contact us right away. We are always here to plan a new blogging strategy for your business.
Our team of professional bloggers is always ready to create magic with words and bring desired conversions.
Happy Blogging!
Your Thoughts