Having a company blog is simple, inexpensive, and undeniably a must. In fact, it is estimated that “each month 329 million people read blogs.”
That’s a lot of people.
As one of the most valuable tools for promoting an online business presence, business blogging can truly make a difference in how successful your company becomes.
Business Blogging Will:
- Allow you to frequently interact with your regulars as well as potential new customers
- Personalize your company brand informally and in a way such that you control how your company is portrayed
- Help you develop authority on your business’ products or services and enable you to showcase that expertise
- Offer widespread visibility of your company through means other than your business website
- Draw in leads that could equal potential sales – after all, someone reading your company blog is already interested and is now more likely to purchase your products or services
- Create trust and loyalty among established customers
- Integrate your business well with all types of social media broadening your company’s audience base
- Influence SEO rankings
- Drive traffic from your business blog to your business website where purchases are ultimately made
Business Blogging How-To: The 3 Main Strategies
1. Write Great Content
- When you write a blog post make the content valuable, consistent, and frequent for those already loyal to your business website and those drawn to your blog for the first time that could possibly hop on over to your business site.
- Promote your products and services but don’t stop there! Engage the readers with tips and advice, provide newsworthy information related to your business, launch new product releases, and even answer customer questions.
- Don’t forget to create catchy titles and subtitles that will grab the casual reader’s attention and draw them in to read more.
Seducing the reader through great content writing can encourage them to check out your business website where they can purchase what your company blog is boasting. Remember, every time you post to your company blog Google catalogs this and directs potential buyers to your site via search engine results. What you do after that is up to you. Intrigue, grab a lead, and sell!
2. Maximize Your Social Media Reach
- Simply put, your blog content is shareable. Not only via share icons the readers use that are located directly on the post itself, but through your own social media accounts where you can share your company’s blog posts.
- Create share icons in a clear spot so readers can share information they love. This spreads your business blogging efforts and reaches more potential customers.
- Popular social networks to consider are: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google+.
- Keep your blog name and social networking names consistent so readers can find you anywhere (the same goes for any images that represent your company).
- Rather than always linking your blog posts to your social media networks, try using eye-catching images, posing questions to readers, or even posting multiple times a day. The key is to engage readers to visit your blog and see what your company is all about!
Never underestimate the power of social media. Users are increasing at an alarming rate and there seems to be no end in sight. One of the greatest ways to drive traffic to your company blog and ultimately your business website is through the active use of social media networks.
3. Take Advantage of SEO Practices
- Within your blog posts be aware of SEO methods.
- Consider using the free WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast (if you use WordPress as your blogging platform).
After installing the plugin you will notice a number of extra fields at the end of your post to fill in to better your SEO score:
1. SEO Title – This is the title of your blog post and will be filled in automatically for you.
2. Keyword – Use words representing what your blog post is about (for help getting the best keywords use this free tool to determine which keywords are popular and which are not – Google Keyword Planner).
3. Meta description – This is the snippet preview of your post that will show up on a Google search. Use your keywords and make it intriguing to the potential reader searching for something to click on when search results show.
4. The goal – Make all the reds turn to green under Focus Keyword, and make you Meta description compelling!
- Not a WordPress user? Don’t want to use an SEO plugin? That’s ok! Decide what your strongest keywords will be and place them in your post title, throughout the post itself (but don’t get crazy ok? let it be natural), in the meta description at the end of your post, in any images used throughout the post (in the image name itself, the title, the alt tag, and description fields), and even in your permalink (*Note – this is the URL of your post: go to Settings>Permalinks>Post Link; this will match your URL name to your blog post title which should include those keywords!)
Taking either of these two methods, or a combination of both, will definitely make your blog post more SEO friendly and rank it high in search results. No, I am not an expert. I am actually far from it. But as you can see, you don’t need to be an expert to gain the benefits of simple SEO practices!
Conclusion
Each company has varying goals and definitions of what it means to be successful. Yet, the one thing that all companies have in common is sales. Sales of some sort. Why not start a company blog and use business blogging to expand those sales? It really is fairly simple, inexpensive, and most of all valuable to the success of your company.
Have you ever used any of these strategies? Can you recommend one not mentioned that may help others maximize their marketing efforts? Leave a comment below, we would love to hear from you!
