Whatever your business’s niche, content marketing can work for you. Promoting your business with content you create and share online has become a vital way to get noticed by your most likely potential customers. Now that 77% of internet users read blog pieces, a blogging strategy could really put your business in the limelight.
If you can’t fit everything you want to say about your business into a 280-character tweet, blogging will help you engage an audience, build a local reputation and establish trust - a top commodity for any local business .
Here are 7 tips on getting started with your own business blogging schedule.
Your website needs its own dedicated blog section, separate from the homepage but clearly linked to in your site’s header.
Your blog should display content chronologically, with your latest posts appearing at the top of the page. If you so choose, you can allow people to comment on your posts to help spark conversations and valuable engagements with your online brand. Remember to install a spam filter though - you don’t want to have to moderate a ton of junk comments!
Most Content Management Systems like WordPress will let you create a new blog section with full posting functionality very easily. If that doesn’t apply to you, speak to your developer who should be able to set you up a blog very quickly.
Been indulging in some metaphysical musings on the structure of reality, or desperate to share your trenchant takes on the new Ian McEwan novel? Save those for your own personal blog - content on your business’s blog has to have a point and needs to be relevant to what your target market will want to read!
You need to think hard about the kind of topics your customers would most welcome reading about. To help, try creating a few personas; semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, constructed out of information you know about your existing customers. Take care over the accuracy of your personas, and once you’re happy with them, use them to guide the direction of your business’s blog content.
Your blogging has to do more than align thematically with your customers’ interests. It’s got to be both educational and engaging the whole way through, providing people with solutions to the kind of problems in their lives that you’re well-placed to assist with.
For instance, if you ran a local plumbing business, you could write a few posts of advice on DIY solutions to common problems. Though it might sound counter intuitive to give away your specialist knowledge for free, sharing your expertise helps cement people’s positive impression of your company as the local leaders in your field, increasing the chances that, next time somebody has a more serious plumbing issue, yours will be the first number they’ll think to call.
Your customers want to enjoy your content, but they’ve also got busy lives themselves, and limited time to spend reading online. This means all of your posts must be easy and intuitive to read and understand.
Separate your content out across several snappy subheaders, keep paragraphs short and uncomplicated, and stick to a clear, traditional structure incorporating an introduction, main points and a conclusion. Your readers will thank you for it!
If you want your blog to grow and reach more new customers, it’s vital that your posts can be found on search engines by local people searching for particular, relevant terms.
Do some research with a tool like KWFinder to discover the exact phrases that people are commonly searching for when they want to find information pertaining to what you sell, and incorporate them into your blog copy.
Also include lots of links to relevant websites and to your previous posts, and work out a winning title for each blog containing your keywords that’ll catch people’s eye as they scroll down Google.
For a more in-depth look at SEO, read this article.
Posting sporadically won’t cut it. For your business blogging efforts to bear fruit, you need to be producing content consistently and prolifically, making an impression at regular intervals both on your audience and on Google’s page ranking algorithms.
Strive to put out at least one fresh blog post each week, and plan out ideas in advance as part of your marketing calendar.
So, you’ve produced a killer piece of writing that’s bound to hit all your audience’s sweet spots. That’s half the work done - now it’s time to show your work to the world.
Your first port of call here should be to share your content via your social media accounts. Regularity matters more than originality - there’s no shame in posting the same piece of content twice. You ought to share as frequently as you can, so try to build up an arsenal of content that you can pull from and reuse at will.
Once you’ve got into rhythm of producing content, you could try and round it up in a fortnightly (or even weekly) newsletter that you can mail out to consenting followers. Click here for our top 7 tips on writing newsletters that get results.
Business blogging requires you to invest some time and creative energy, but it’s a tried-and-tested (and affordable) way of making sure your target audience remember your business .
If we were to boil down best blogging practice into 3 essential components, they would be to post well, post often and promote widely.
If you’d like to get started yourself, our digital experts can set you up a website with full blogging functionality, built to the best practices in contemporary web design.
Enjoyed this article? Try these from our vaults:
