Why should your small business have a blog?

Blogging is a powerful marketing tool that can help your business reach its goals. It provides you with the opportunity to connect with your customers in a more personal way and create relationships with them.

Blogging also creates opportunities to promote your products or services through content marketing so that your potential customers find out about them.

If you’re struggling with how to go about writing your blog posts, then hopefully after reading this one you will have a bit more understanding of a) the importance of blogging and b) how to go about doing it more effectively.

How to make your presence known with an effective and engaging blog post

When it comes to gaining visibility for your business, writing blog posts is one of the most effective ways to grow your online presence. Blog posts can be interactive, ever-changing and are a good way for you to establish yourself as an authority on the subject you are talking about and is a proven way to gain long-term loyal followers.  Blogging should be a major cornerstone of your content marketing strategy, whether you’re publishing on your company’s website or on social media.

We are all aware of the fact that our brands are built on social media websites, blogs, and other online platforms.  So, if you want to make your presence known it is vital to write great blog posts that people want to read and share, further developing a strong brand for you or your business.  But what makes a blog post effective? And how do you go about creating an engaging blog post? Let’s find out!

• Firstly, you should start with a clickable title that appeals to your target audience and provides them with a solid idea about what they can expect from that post once they click on it. 
• Secondly, you then want to have a strong introduction explaining the key points you are going to cover in the post and you probably want to limit these points to 5 maximum, this will help your readers to retain the information of the post and not leave them feeling overwhelmed.
• After talking through each point, you then want to condense all of them into a summary or conclusion to remind the reader and help them retain what they have just read.  At this point you can also include a call-to-action paragraph for the reader – something for them to do after reading your blog post, maybe they would be interested in signing up to a newsletter or getting in touch with you to learn more about your offerings.

The 3 most important things to keep in mind when writing your blog posts

• Write for your readers first and foremost. Before you begin writing out your post try and establish what kind of tone or language your ideal audience would relate to. As an example, they might be more receptive to what you have to say if you use a candid, casual or humorous tone as opposed to a more informative, assertive, or convincing tone.  By writing with your readers in mind it’s far more likely that they will read your future blog post and convert to customers organically.  A good rule of thumb is to think about how you would talk to them verbally face to face.
• Figure out what it is you want to achieve with your blog post.  Are you looking to inform the reader and simply provide them with an additional resource that they can refer to from time to time and have your website act as a hub of information, or are you looking to plant a seed that eventually leads to them interacting with you or your business?  In my opinion, the best blogs are those that primarily focus on acting as an informative hub of resources without pushing for sales but hopefully getting them eventually with enough repeat visits to your blog.
• Write about things that you care about or have a sound knowledge of.  The amount of passion you have for your subject will be noticed through the writing in your blog post and your readers will be able to establish quickly just how invested you are in the subject matter.  It also helps to do your research about the subject that you are writing about.  See what others in your niche have had to say about it and double check that what you are about to write is something that answers a question that your audience is actively looking to solve. 

Some of the things you will want to consider when doing your research are:

• Has the topic been covered by someone else already in a capacity better then you could?
• Could you improve on or repurpose their content into another form of content, perhaps an infographic or video blog (vlog) as an example?
• Is their content showing up on the front page of a Google search?  Will your post be competing with an established website that has amazing authority and traffic to it daily?

Some ways to Optimize Your Blog For Google Search Results

If you are wanting your content and your website to rank highly in google search results, you need to publish content that is of a high quality.  Your blog posts need to have great content that is informative and will encourage potential readers to keep returning to your website.  If you can get a large number of readers to your blog and if you can have them stay on your pages for a long duration (low bounce rate), these are both ranking signals that will further improve googles perspective of your website and its content.

One of the first things you want to do is compile a list of keywords that are associated with your blog post. If you have a newer website with limited authority you will want to focus on long-tail keywords.  These are searches that are usually 3 to 5 words long.  The reason for focusing on long-tail keywords is because they are less competitive and are very specific to what your audience is looking for e.g. “how to make diner style pancakes” vs “pancake recipe”. While not as many people will search for the first search term, those that do will more likely than not land on your page.

Pick one broader term as your key title, this should be wrapped in a heading tag to signal to search engines what users can expect to generally find on that page, then break your blog post down into 3 to 5 sections that extend on that.  Introduce these sections at the start of your blog post, go through the sections (body of your content) and then summarise them at the end.  You will see that this blog post follows this exact structure.

Once you are happy with the content of your blog you just want to check there is no plagiarism or sections of your post that are found on other websites, this will be a huge black flag for Google and is a negative ranking signal that could push you down the search engine results pages.  A good plagiarism checker is this one on Grammarly.

Post to your blog consistently!  One of the most important things you can do with regards to your own blog is be consistent, google will crawl your website periodically with “spiders” to check for new content and index it. If it sees that your website is being updated with fresh content every week then it sends those spiders to crawl your website that frequently, this can have an impact on how your website ranks as well, google likes websites that post new content o a regular basis. This is part of the reason why news websites rank so easily.

In summary

Blogging is a great tool for growing your business and its brand, while providing an opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your industry.  Like most marketing efforts it does need to be done with consistency but should pay off long-term. 

Some things to consider when writing your blog posts are that you should be writing with your readers in mind, work out what it is you want your blog to achieve overall, don’t just focus on pushing for sales – the best blogs are those that serve as a hub for potential customers to come to with hope of drumming up sales organically and lastly but probably most importantly is write about things that you are passionate about or have a great knowledge of, by doing this it will be reflected in your writing and you will enjoy the process far more overall. 

Hopefully this post has given you a bit more of an idea on how to blog effectively or inspired you a bit to get blogging yourself. If you want to incorporate a blog into your website, feel free to reach out to us about how we could make it a more seamless exercise for you by filling out our contact form or send us a message in the live chat to the bottom right of your screen.