It is however important to understand that creating a blog for your business, entails an investment of resources and therefore must be done right to provide the maximum value to your business.
Here, I will discuss the in’s and out’s of business blogging and give you all the information that you require to create a successful business blog.
What is a Business Blog?
A business blog can be seen as a compilation of articles related to your business. It is a marketing tool that can be instrumental in driving more traffic (i.e visitors) to your website and thus help your business convert more.
These conversions can both be in the form of getting more leads (to be used in further marketing efforts) or inducing visitors to purchase your products or signup for your services online.
How Does a Business Blog help Drive More Conversions?
A business blog is only a tool for driving more traffic to your website. Typically a blog will direct visitors towards one or more ‘landing pages’ on your website. Landing pages are pages on your website that are optimised to help visitors convert. The next section speaks a little more on landing pages.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page, in common parlance, can be any page on a website where a visitor arrives at. However, for the marketing point of view, a Landing Page is used to define a standalone page on your website that is optimised to direct visitors towards your intended conversion goal i.e lead generation or actual sales.
Landing pages are basically of the following two types:
1. Click Through Landing Pages.
2. Lead Generation Landing Pages.
Next we will try to understand what each of these landing pages actually mean.
1. Click Through Landing Page: The purpose of a click through landing page is to generate user interest about the product or service line on offer sufficiently enough to induce them to click through to another page on your website (which typically houses a detailed listing of your products or services).
2. Lead Generation Landing Pages: Lead generation landing pages are used to capture visitor data like name, gender and email address so that these can be used in further marketing efforts (eg email marketing). Lead generation landing pages typically offer rewards to visitors to induce them to input their data. Examples of these rewards can be a discount coupon or an ebook.
Note that your business blogging efforts to work, you need to create one or more landing pages that are optimised to help visitors (who arrive via your business blog) to convert.
The Dynamics of Business Blogging.
This is how Business Blogging Works:
1. You pull visitors to your business blog by creating content that your target audience is likely to find useful (read indispensable). This content can take various forms like articles, videos, infographics, podcasts or any combination of these.
2. The next step is to influence these visitors to convert by directing them to one or more landing pages within your website. This is achieved by incorporating one or more ‘Calls to Actions” within the blog post or in the sidebar. You get the best results when you align your ‘calls to action’ with the subject of your blog post.
What Should You Blog About?
As mentioned above, the purpose of a business blog is to pull visitors by creating content that caters to your target audience. Content is thus the heart and soul of any business blog.
One of the challenges that marketers face is finding topics to blog about.
The best content ideas are those that focus on solving problems or provide valuable information that your target audience is not likely to find elsewhere. Relevancy is of primary importance here.
Also, creating content aligned to a particular sales objective tends to work well.
For example if you own a travel company which regularly organises various trekking tours in India, you could create a post on “The Best Places to Go Trekking in India” to draw in people likely to have an interest in trekking. Next incorporate a suitable call to action within the post to direct visitors towards a page within your website where they can find information on the upcoming treks organised by your company.
Thus by creating a post that is aligned towards your objective of finding more people to sign up for your trekking tour, you increase your chances of conversion.
Great content also helps establish your authority and project yourself as a thought leader within your Industry.
How Often Should You Blog?
There is no simple answer to this question. However, one this is pretty clear. The more you blog, the more traffic you get.
According to Hubspot, an important factor that “you need to consider when creating your blogging schedule is setting expectations. You might blog once a week or twice a month, and that will be ok if your posts reveal great content that engages an active audience. But make sure you publish your posts around the same time so that you create anticipation in your readers.”
Business Blogging Tips.
Here are a few tips to help you achieve better results from your business blogging adventures:
1. Make sure that your blog has a clean interface and puts focus on your content.
2. Use the Sidebar to your advantage. Use this space to tell visitors who you are, what you do best.
3. Optimise your blog for search engines. That is where you get the most traffic from.
4. Incorporate keywords relevant to your business within your blog post. This helps you attract more targeted search engine traffic.
5. Invite industry experts to guest post on your blog. This has multiple benefits. One you find quality content. Secondly, the Industry Expect will likely share the post among his/her followers across various social media channels giving your business some great exposure.
6. Share posts from your business blog across your social media channels. Also encourage visitors to share your content on social media.
Thanks for your time. Happy Blogging!
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