One of the most effective types of content marketing is blogging. Setting up your own business blog gives visitors to your website answers to questions they have, and it establishes your thought leadership in your industry.
Guest blogging on other well-respected websites helps you expand your reach, and introduces you and your brand to people who wouldn’t otherwise have found you.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a great writer, the tips here can help you find your voice, create readable content, and proofread your content like a pro.
If you still find yourself shaky on the idea of blogging regularly, consider hiring Egg Marketing to make your brand shine through content. We have deep experience writing for industries like technology, mobile, SaaS, small business, and startups.
I’ve written before about the benefits of guest blogging for other blogs that target your industry. It can be a powerful tool if you target decently popular sites that your audience visits frequently. You provide useful content, and they can click that link to your site in your author bio.
At Egg, we’ve been offering more of this service, and I wanted to share some of our successes.
If you want to make a blog into a success then it will need to meet at least some basic criteria. For one it will need to look good and work well on the majority of machines for instance. At the same time it will also be important that it provides useful information to ensure that it is worth the time spent reading it.
One of the most basic requirements of all though is that your blog reads well. In other words, it must be enjoyable and easy to read, and it must have a distinct tone and voice’ that suits the subject matter. If you don’t accomplish at least this much, then people will think your blog is unprofessional and may not trust the information they get from it. Alternatively, they may simply not enjoy reading it and feel as though the information isn’t worth the effort taken to extract it. Finding the right voice for your blog may take some effort.
At Egg, we’ve been writing and pitching more guest posts for our clients. We’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. Highly customized pitches work. Reading the blog where we want to place a post works. Finding a niche that doesn’t have enough content works. Spamming blogs with unrelated content does not.
I field guest post requests for The Marketing Eggspert blog too. It’s interesting that in the new age of Google regulations on SEO and keywords, I’m still getting requests from people who want to link to completely unrelated sites, like payday loans or online college courses. I turn them down, of course. I do have my blog’s reputation to uphold!
I recently spent some time following software companies on Twitter (since we’re now focusing on serving the software industry, I thought it was a good idea!). I noticed something interesting. While most had sleek, appealing sites, only about one in 10 had a blog! What’s the reason?
My theory, based on what I’ve gleaned from existing software clients, is that software companies smaller ones, anyway tend to be run by a couple of programmers, and maybe an intern or two. There’s simply no one to write the content for the blog. Or the founder tries to provide the content and either doesn’t have time, or focuses on technical topics that only his team cares about.
Am I striking a nerve here?
Congratulations! You are currently living in a phenomenal place in the history of mankind. The invention of the Internet has opened up our ability to succeed in business to unbelievable levels. You can reach so many people in so many walks of life regardless of what line of business you are in.
It does, however, take a little work on your part. It requires focus, intention, energy, and passion to build a strong clientele, and a business blog is a fantastic way to pull in customers if you do it correctly.
Following are five tips on how to boost traffic to your business blog:
As with most old adages, the saying, “The squeaky wheel gets the oil,” does contain a grain or two of truth. That doesn’t mean you should constantly bug your clients with spam and useless information, but you should take the time to blog each and every week. When you post valid content each week, your customers start making it a habit to visit your site and consequently start building a relationship with you and your business. The next time anything comes to mind regarding your line of business, you will be the “squeaky wheel” that they think of first.
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, among others, have all become valuable resources for all sizes of businesses. When you open yourself up to the social media world, you increase your presence and visible credibility through your fans. At the same time, you can increase your site’s optimization through sharing useful information, images and segments of blog posts and linking back to your site. When people comment or like something on your public profile page, each of their friends is notified of their activity and consequently you open your business up not only to the people who like you but also to all of the people who like them. Always encourage your friends and fans to share the content you post on social media sites. You can also place a link to your social media sites on your website, encouraging traffic to your business blog that comes to your webpage to follow you on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This will help to grow your audience in a very short amount of time.
When you blog as much as I do, you sometimes suffer from what I call “blogger’s block.” Just like writer’s block, it can keep you from coming up with ideas, or simply stall you from writing content on your company’s blog regularly. Unfortunately, most of us entrepreneurs don’t have the luxury of waiting until creativity strikes to blog, so I’ve come up with 5 tips to help you kick blogger’s block in the butt and keep writing fabulous posts.
1. Keep a List of Topics Handy. The biggest obstacle for me is coming up with yet another fresh idea on a topic I’ve already written hundreds of posts about. When we sit down to write, ideas don’t always flow. That’s why I recommend keeping a spreadsheet handy where you can save ideas for when you’re ready to write. Ideas come at the oddest times for me; sometimes I wake up with one, or find one while I’m winding down on the weekend. I’m quick to record it, lest I forget it.
In the world of blogging, WordPress is king. It has more options, tools, and other developers than any other blogging platform. However, new bloggers are more likely to dip their toes in the blogging pool with something like Blogger, which caters to newbies. Just because you’re using a less complex blogging platform doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO best practices. Here are a few blogger tools for SEO that I recommend.
allows you to see the source of your traffic. In simple terms, you can view which websites and search engines bring the most people to your blog. This helps you be more strategic in your social media marketing. It lets you know which posts are the most influential. It also gives you an idea which areas of advertising need the most attention. For example, if most of your traffic comes from the links you place on Twitter, you may need to give Facebook a little more of your time. This will ensure that you’re receiving traffic from multiple sources not just one.
Tip: You will need a Google Web Property ID in order see your Google show up on your Blogger Dashboard.
When you’re one business in a sea of thousands, you’ve got to take every advantage to stand out. One way to do that is to show off the fact that you’re an industry expert in your field. You know your industry inside and out, and the more you share your wisdom, the better connected potential customers become to you and your brand.
Blogging is one of the best ways to become an industry expert. Consider this: people are searching for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems about 400,000 times a day. If your business blog provides answers to those questions, you’ve attracted new loyal followers. And those followers, if you continue to help them, will become new customers.
Previously I wrote about how to get more of your guest posts picked up. So when Susan was nice enough to ask if I would like to write here again, I thought it would be appropriate to dive a little deeper into the subject of writing guest posts.
From an SEO perspective the reason is simple, you gain backlinks to your site.
A link is like a vote from one site to another, signaling that they trust (or endorse) the content, services and/or products on the site. The idea behind Google’s thinking is, the more links you receive from trusted, high ranking sites, the more reputable you are. This and many other factors play in where you rank in the search results.
However, the benefits of guest posting can be much greater for a business than just acquiring links.
Good SEO practice isn’t just about knowing what to sell and how to sell it; it’s also about knowing when to sell it. One study, overseen by Weber Shandwick’s president of digital communications, found that there is a disconnect between theory and reality when it comes to socialising a brand. leaders need a blueprint. This disconnect is never so apparent as when we can see brand marketing operating at the wrong time, particularly if it is well before or just after the event.
Since social media is and will be of such vital importance to future digital marketing, social media strategists who are experienced at predicting the fluctuations of social media network trends are vital for the coordination of optimally timed digital marketing. In-house optimisations can also be performed by re-evaluating the way your business produces and publishes content in order to produce a blueprint as mentioned above for future all future content management.
A content calendar is a calendar, digital or otherwise, which will allow you to plan the publishing of your content in advance a blueprint of sorts. At its essence it’s an organisational device, useful for increasing the quantity of your posts and optimising the time of their release. Additionally, planning your content in advance will increase its quality and create more advertising opportunities for your business. A content calendar can be as simple or as complicated as you wish and can be utilised by one or many users, depending on the size and types of your needs.
The blogging platform has really taken the business world by storm in this past couple of years. Slowly but surely I’ve seen topics at entrepreneurial conferences shift from simple email marketing and lead generation to massive blog subscriptions and WordPress plugins seminars.
Love it or hate it, business blogging is everywhere nowadays and will probably be around for the long haul.
So how does this affect your small business? Should you stop everything and pick up blogging? Or should you just ignore it as a trend since it wouldn’t really fit with what your company does anyway?
It’s different for every case. But for this article, I’ll go through the important things every small business should know about blogging, including why so many companies find it to be a worthwhile business platform, and what to expect if you decide to start your own blog.
