How to Boost your Business With Blogging
In today's world, blogging is one of the most essential and cost-effective strategies many enterprises are utilising to boost their business. With a blog, you can achieve the growth your business desires, attract more customers, and generate more revenue.
Beyond that, it serves as an avenue to establish your business as an authority in the field, share valuable content with the world and build healthy relationships and trust.
While there are a lot of benefits to be derived, there are several steps, practices and techniques you should be familiar with before starting. Incorpuk in this guide, presents everything you need to know on how to boost your business with blogging.
Steps to Start Blogging for Your Business
Here are the 9 steps to take to boost your business with blogging.
1. Identify Your Goals and Objectives for Blogging
As a business owner looking forward to starting blogging, the first step to take is to set the goals and objectives for which you want to blog. While your utmost goal will be to promote your business, you might also want to include other objectives that will facilitate the achievement of the main goal.
This could include increasing website engagement, search visibility, and so on. Beyond that, you would also want to set goals that would aid your content creation process. Once you have the goals, you should create a benchmark for achieving them and estimating how far you’ve gone.
Identifying and stating your goals helps give a direction for your blogging and, more so, serves as a yardstick for measuring your level of success.
2. Define Your Audience
Now that you know your goals, the next step is to identify your audience. As a blogger, you don’t write for yourself, but you write for your target audience. With that, you must be able to come up with content that is interesting and appealing to them.
Moreso, you need to know what they want to learn about and what questions they are likely finding answers to. As a business owner, you should know those who are likely going to be interested in your product or service.
This set of people would most times be your target audience, and so your content should be for them. You would want to identify the characteristics of your target audience including their age, gender, occupation, interest and many more. Moreover, you could use tools like Google Analytics and others to research your audience.
If you already own a website and have great traffic on it, you might want to conduct a survey to see what your audience wants to know more about, the questions they want answers to and how else you could help them.
Identifying your audience is key as it helps you strategize your content in the right way, helps meet the content demand of your customers and, more so, directs potential customers to your website.
3. Create a Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar is another step you should plan out on time. As a business owner looking forward to boosting your business with blogging, you should consistently dish out valuable content.
As such, you need to plan out the number of posts to be published in a week, month and more. If you decide to make only a few posts per month, then you wouldn’t expect your site to rank as those who post consistently.
As such, your website visibility will only decrease over time rather than improve. Moreover, you need to consistently serve your audience. Once your readers trust that you have answers to their questions or solutions to their problems, then they are most likely to search your website directly as they are conversant with it.
While it could take extra effort to stay consistent and relevant, creating a content calendar that indicates what you want to write about and when to publish it makes blogging much easier. Moreover, you would also want to ensure you publish only quality and valuable content.
4. Do Keywords Research
With keyword research, you would be able to identify phrases and topics that your potential audience is most likely to be searching for. As a business owner who's into blogging, you must strategise your content to include phrases that customers are searching for on search engines.
This way they would be able to find your website whenever a search is made. Without this, generating new traffic to your website and meeting new customers could be difficult.
As such you need to do extensive keyword research before you begin to write. Basically, we have short and long-tail keywords. While the long-tail keywords are usually more specific, the short ones are more general.
For example, if you are into accounting services, then your target audience will most likely be searching for the best accounting tools, Accounting tips for small business owners and lots more.
Keyword research provides guidance on the kinds of topics you will be publishing on your website and must be done while putting your audience's intent in mind. Tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, and Google Keyword Planner would also help with your keyword research.
5. Write and publish your first Blog post
Now is the time to start writing and publishing your content. Since you have already done your keyword research and prepared a content calendar, then this step would be much easier.
While writing you should put your audience in mind and address them directly. Your blog post could take the form of how-to articles, FAQs, research-based articles and lots more.
Your content should also be valuable, provide specific answers to questions, solve the audience's problem, teach them new things that are related to your business, etc.
Beyond that, your post must specifically be grammatically correct, error-free, of high quality, highly organised, unplagiarized and so on. While there are many AI tools you could use to generate your content, you would want to ensure that they aren’t plagiarised.
With the use of tool like Grammarly, you would be able to correct errors in your writing and check for any form of plagiarism. Beyond that, you should also include some form of visuals in the form of images, videos, infographics, tables, etc, in your write-up to make them more appealing.
7. Consider SEO
In today’s world, so many businesses just like you are into blogging and with that millions of blog posts are published almost every day. Gaining traction and ranking on search engines are thus more competitive than before.
So as a blogger, you need to consider SEO and inculcate its practices when writing and publishing your post. This way, you would be able to rank on search engines, attract more traffic and meet potential customers. Usually, you would need to know how to strategize the SEO practices to use.
First is to ensure that your post provides adequate answers and solutions to your audience's questions and queries. Beyond that, you would also want to ensure that you strategically place the right keywords in some parts of your article.
This should be in the title, heading and subheadings, body and conclusion. Moreover, you should include internal and external links, images, videos, tables, etc, where needed, refresh your blog content and work on improving your website speed.
8. Network with Others
Beyond creating posts that direct traffic to your website and help attract customers, you should also consider publishing contents that present you as an authority and build your network within your industry.
This way you would want to publish contents that serve your industry as a whole. This should include posts gathered from interviews with experts from the industry, findings from an industry research or survey, industry trending news and topics, information gathered from industry events and lots more.
Publishing content like this helps you build relationships with other businesses within the industry, as they will be able to share your content. Moreover, this could create a chance for you to get noticed by the media, other authority websites and experts from your industry. This alone could help you publicise your website and attract potential customers.
9. Promote your Blog
You also have to take an extra step to market your blog. Beyond strategizing SEO practices, there are also other marketing options you could use to drive traffic to your blog. If you have social media pages for your business, you should consider tailoring your blog post to suit each social media handle.
This way you can connect the blog post to your social media pages and vice versa. The key to this is to find other means to invite people to your blog post and social media is a great way to achieve that. Beyond that, your business website and blogs should contain links to your social media handles. Also, you might also want to try email marketing.
This way, you could encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter right from your blog post. With that, you can easily send reminders to them on topics released, share new product offers, market your product directly and lots more. While blogging for business is a marketing strategy on its own, you can make it work better for you by combining it with other marketing options.
10. Review and Analyse your Blog Performance
Lastly, you would want to ensure you consistently analyse your blog performance. This involves reviewing the traffic and engagement generated over time, blog search impressions gained and lots more.
With these metrics, you would be able to observe how effective your blog content is and the necessary actions to take. Based on the analysis made, you will be able to make better decisions regarding content to upload, SEO practices to use, other marketing options to employ for your blog and so on.
Benefits of Boosting Your Business with Blogging
Blogging is one essential marketing option you would want to consider as a business owner. Here are some of the benefits of boosting your business with blogging.
1. Boost website traffic
Beyond having a website that showcases your product or service, publishing quality blog posts on your website helps you generate more website traffic. As you'd expect, businesses that are into blogging are much more likely to experience more website visitors than those that do not.
This is simply to say that the more traffic you gain to your business website, the more you're able to attract potential customers. By strategizing the SEO practices and publishing content that suits your target audience, you will be able to attract the right set of people to your business.
2. Serves as a business long-term investment
When you invest in social media ads, you could expect a fast return on investment. While blogging doesn’t yield quickly like other advertising mediums, it serves as a long-term investment and gives better results over a period of time.
When you consistently upload blog posts on your platform, you could expect it to yield results within 6 months to a year or even less as the case may be. However, each blog post would continue to yield better results for you in years to come. So this is a marketing option you would want to consider as it gives better results and helps attract customers over a long period of time.
3. Helps Build trust and relationship
People are more likely to buy from brands they are familiar with than the ones they don’t know. As audiences visit your blog and read your content, they get familiar with your brand in some way.
By dishing out content about your company and what you offer and providing knowledge about topics in your industry, they tend to gain the necessary information needed to deal with you.
And even if they don't buy your product or service at the moment, you will always be the first brand to be remembered when they need your service. As such they would have built the trust right from reading your contents before even patronising you.
4. Presents you as an Authority
Dishing out valuable content helps present you as an authority within your field. By sharing ideas, experiences, and knowledge within your field, the target audience views you as an expert in the industry.
Whether we like it or not, people would always have questions and more so desire a genuine answer to them. If you’re able to identify these questions, queries and problems and can provide solutions and answer them through your blog, then you will be seen as an authority in your field.
5. Helps you Stand out from Competitors
With so many competitors here and there, getting attention from the audience requires more extra work. With a blog post, you have the chance to showcase why you’re the best within the field, what you have to offer that is different from others and why they should patronise you.
Moreover, strategizing the right SEO practices helps you rank on search engines and this makes it much easier for you to be visible even in the face of competitors. So, while also blogging to boost your business, you would want to keep your competitors in mind.
Other Tips to Note While Blogging to Boost Your Business
Beyond following the above steps, there are some key blogging tips you should note for better results.
- Beyond including SEO practices and using social media and emails to drive traffic to your blog, you would also want to ensure that a link to your blog list is included in the main menu of your website. This way individuals will be able to read through your blog post even when they initially do not intend to do so.
- You should also include a link to several blog posts in different areas of your website. You could link blog posts to one another or link other areas of your website to blog content and vice versa. You should also inculcate the act of introducing authoritative external links as you write.
- Inviting a proofreader to see through your content before publishing is another thing to consider. While tools like Grammarly could help you achieve error-free content, it's worth allowing a second eye to check them.
- Quality over quantity is another thing to consider while blogging. Depending on the type of content you are publishing, you might need to write up to 500 or 1000 words and beyond. However, dishing out quality content should be key.
- Rather than focusing on only generalised topics within the industry, you could share content relating your business experience or ideas from industry experts, information gathered from research, surveys or events and so on.
- You should also provide an avenue for your potential audience to comment or ask questions after reading your post. This should preferably be beneath each blog post. While doing that, be sure to provide relevant answers and replies to each comment made.
Incorporate Your Company with Incorpuk Today
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Conclusion
While blogging is one of the best marketing options you could use to boost your business, you should consider following the right SEO practices, identifying the target audience and, more so, giving out only valuable, high-quality content to get the best results. if you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact one of our experts here.