Setting up a blog on your business’s website is an easy and cost-effective way to promote your brand, drive website traffic, and grow your business. Yet many small businesses are not making the most of the simplicity of blogging as a marketing tool. We’ve put together a short guide for growing your business with blogging to get you started.
- Get professional advice
If terms like ‘SEO’ and ‘backlinks’ sound like a foreign language to you, the first step in setting up an effective business blog is to seek out professional advice. The cheap way to do this is to turn to Google – there are plenty of guides out there even more comprehensive than this one. The other option is to hire a blog writer. Even if it is just to write your first five posts, a freelance blog writer could help you develop a blogging strategy and help get you started.
- Target your customers
When writing posts for your website’s blog, it’s vital that you target it towards your customer base. This means creating content that they will be interested in and that they will find engaging. For example, if you run a software company, chances are your customers won’t be experts in software, so avoid technical language. Your customers, however, could be business owners, so using recent statistics and examples that they will relate to will be more engaging for them.
- Create useful content
If you’re stuck for content ideas, always opt for useful content. That means creating guides, tutorials, or recommendation lists that your customers will find useful. Not only will this content be useful for your current customers – it will attract new customers too. For example, if you run a clothing e-commerce business, a blog post on ‘how to remove wine stains from your clothes’ will drive new traffic to your website made up of users who could then convert to customers.
- Share your content
As you create blog posts, it’s vital that you then share this content across all of your marketing channels. Social media is your first port of call, followed by sending out new blog posts to your email subscribers. Ideally, you want to create content that is also shareable – meaning that users will share it on Facebook or retweet it on Instagram. This guide for creating shareable content for social media has some useful tips and tricks.
- Measure your blog’s performance
Once you’ve got a few blog posts under your belt, it’s time to start measuring your blog’s performance. This means checking your blog page’s analytics to find out what posts are driving the most traffic and what posts are converting the best. This will help you decide what sort of content you should focus on in future as you’ll have a better idea of what your customers are interested in.
Blog writing might sound like a daunting task for business owners who aren’t experienced in content creation. You don’t need to be the world’s best writer to create a business blog that will grow your business. Focus your efforts on creating useful, shareable content that new and future customers will want to click on.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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