If you own a business, you should seriously consider having a blog for your business. There are several advantages of a blog as it allows you to connect with your customers and at the same time, also increase your brand awareness. In short, blogging is one of the most effective and cheapest ways to grow your business.
A blog has the potential to increase traffic to your website, enhance sales, and establish your business as an authority in your industry, when done properly. A well done blog can also help a business gain entry into new markets. However, most small business owners don’t really know much about the advantages of blogging. While some business owners don’t seem to have time for writing blog posts, others often lack ideas to write high-quality blog posts. If you’re interested in blogging for business, here are a few tips for you to write and build a successful business blog:
Targeted Blog Posts
You need to realize that a business blog isn’t meant to share your personal opinion. The blog is for your existing and potential customers. This is why you need to target potential customers while writing blog posts. This is the reason, it is recommended to write blog posts that offer fresh insights into your industry or help in solving a problem for your customers.
Blog Content – Planning
Many small business owners do not blog as they are either short of time or ideas. However, such entrepreneurs can need just a little bit of planning to have enough ideas to populate their blog for several weeks or months. If you’re a small business owner, you can write blog posts about the questions that are asked most frequently by your customers. Take the example of a jewelry store owner. The store owner can write blog posts about helping how to choose the right diamond.
If you want to discover keywords or phrases that are frequently used by people for searching and finding your service, Google AdWords keyword tool can be of great help. Once you have identified the phrase on which you want to write the blog post, it should also be used as the title of the blog. It’s a highly effective way to bring organic traffic to your blog and to make more people aware of your business. Continuing with the jewelry store owner example, the blog title in this case could be ‘tips to buy a diamond’.
Always Provide Valuable Content
It is important for you to provide valuable content to your audience if you want to establish your website as an authority in your particular industry. Valuable content on your blog will also help in enhancing return visits and that should help in increasing your sales.
If you’re short of time and are unable to write blog posts on your own or if you lack writing skills, you always have the option of using a blog writing service. It will help a lot as you will get better quality content and you will also have free time that can be better used elsewhere.
Regular Blogging is Important
People have different ideas on the frequency of updating a blog but one thing everyone agrees on is that you need to stick to a frequency. Choose a frequency you’re able to maintain and more importantly, you should stick to that publishing frequency. It’s completely fine to blog once a week or once every 2 weeks. The thing that really matters is the consistency. You also need to ensure that all your blog posts are useful and valuable for your readers.
Search engines such as Google are hungry for new content and frequency of a blogging on your website has a direct connection to search engine rankings. The more you blog, the better your rankings are likely to be and it will also help in your website gaining increased visibility among target audience.
Focus on Creating a Unique Blogging Style
Blogs are meant to be informal and this is why, when you plan your blog, it needs to bring out that human side of your business. Try to give your writing some personality and don’t focus too much on selling things. It will help in enhancing the response rate among your customers and they are more likely to buy the product or services you’re selling.
Minimum Word Count
Many experts in blogging recommend at least 400 words for blogs. In case your post is more than 400 words long, think of breaking into several posts. You also need to understand that people don’t really read blog posts but they scan the content. This is why it’s important for you to ensure that every single word in your blog post is meaningful.
Lack of Comments – Don’t Worry about It
If you’re not getting any comments on your blog posts, don’t get anxious. Lack of comments does not mean that your content is not being read. Not everybody likes to comment on the blogs they visit. Think about your own reading habit. Most people are like you and very few like to leave a comment. However, as your blog traffic starts increasing, you will start getting more comments.
Make It Easy to Share
Links are the foundation of the Internet and this is why your readers shouldn’t have to struggle if they want to share your content across the Internet. For this, you can use share icons. The social networking icons make it easy for visitors to share your blog posts. It will help in driving traffic and increasing sales.
Measure the Performance of Your Blog
You need to install a web stats tool for measuring the performance of your website. One of the most popular tools used by almost everyone is Google Analytics and it is completely free to use. It doesn’t take long to install and you should be able to install it in just a few minutes. As you keep posting content on your blog, this analytics tool will provide you a clear picture of how visitors are discovering your blog and which ones are the most popular posts on your blog. It will help you in figuring out the content that is preferred by your readers.
To conclude, there are several advantages of blogging for your business. So, follow the steps discussed above in order to start building a good blog that will go a long way in promoting your business.