How many times have we heard from business and marketing experts that blogging is a great tool for our business and we all should be doing it? But do we really understand why? In
The sales reasons to blog
Your website is an online pitch. People need to find what they need, quickly including how to take the next step towards a purchase. The blog is a place to share the latest developments and events but also to position yourself as an industry expert.
Active company blogs generate 67% more leads than websites without blogs. (Source HubSpot) Good content reveals enough for them to trust you and part with their money.
The techie reasons to blog
So we have a beautiful website. It welcomes our customers, signposts visitors clearly to take action (e.g. make a purchase, book a meeting) and our web developer has completed all the relevant work to ensure it can be found easily by search engines – this is what we call Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Search engines like Google want to offer valuable and quick experience to their users, helping them to find the exact content they need and fast. Google has over 200 ranking factors to determine what content to return in a search. WOAH!
For most of us, it’s unrealistic to check these ranking factors every time we add content to our website – let’s leave that to the tech team. The easiest way to boost our search engine authority is by consistently publishing to a blog. Research shows that websites with blogs get 55% more traffic than those who don’t.
The marketing reasons to blog
It’s not enough to hop online and publish content that says ‘buy my stuff’ over and over. We need stories to inspire and connect our audiences with our brand.
Writing a good blog post with a story that showcases what we do, how we do it and how we solve our customers’ problems not only boosts our website but creates a great starting point for social media content. I almost always start out a marketing campaign with a blog post and build my content plan from there. It saves oodles of time.
The benefits of guest blogging
Having a guest post published on someone else’s blog is an effective way to get some PR for your business but also provides you with a link back to your website – one of the SEO rankings.
The same goes for accepting guest posts on your blog. You can offer a swap with another business (keep it relevant to your brand) or simply host them as a quick way to get fresh content for your blog.
Both of these also boost your online community credentials, showing audiences you are supportive, collaborative and highly engaged with others. People will see this and feel confident working with you.
Where to start!
- Using your marketing plan, sketch out ideas for 6 blog posts. What do you want to talk about? What do your customers need to know the most?
- Put together an editorial plan.
- Be realistic with your time. One blog a month could be enough to start off with.
- Decide how you will blog. You can use video or photo galleries to help illustrate your story but remember it’s words that search engines look for. So if you go the visual route, brush up on video transcription and tagging uploaded images.
- Include guest blogging in your schedule.
- Have a social media promotion plan for your post. Perhaps you’ll do a Facebook LIVE on the topic where you can urge people to read more on your website?
- Draft up your content. Either directly to the blog or in a Word document. After writing it, I always leave a good few hours, make a cuppa, forget about it before reading what I’ve written
- Proofread! Use apps like Grammarly to speed it up.
- Post and promote. With most blogging platforms you can schedule the post to publish at a particular time.
Thanks, Claire for sharing your wisdom with us! Join us for #MNCHour 8 pm 13 February where Claire will be sharing more blogging tips. Go give her a follow on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook!
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