If you haven’t started a blog for your business website yet you are missing out on a huge range of benefits that a business blog can bring including more traffic, increased rankings, more leads, and more sales. If you’re thinking about starting up a blog for your business, keep reading for our easy to follow guide to creating a successful business blog.
Step 1: Planning
Research Your Audience
The first thing that you need to do when creating a blog for your business website is conduct extensive audience research. This is because you need to know exactly who will be reading your blog and what information they want to know.
Personas – Who Are They?
One technique you can use to ensure that your blog content is written to appeal to your target audience is to create customer personas. A customer persona is simply a fictional representation of your average customer. You can use metrics found in Google and Facebook marketing analytics to create an accurate persona.
For example, if the average age range of your audience is 25 – 35 years old, give your persona an age within that range. And if people who are interested in your products are usually also interested in gardening, add this in as their hobby or job. Continue listing characteristics of your persona like what kind of car they would drive or how many children they have until you have a clear picture of who this person is.
Once you have created one or multiple personas, keep them in mind while writing your articles. Ask yourself, would they be interested in this? Is this the kind of language they would use themselves, or is it too complicated or too basic? This will ensure that your blogs resonate with your target audience for a higher return on investment.
Research – What Do They Want?
The content on your blog should aim to answer the questions that your audience is asking, and provide useful insights into your products and industry. So, once you have identified your audience, you need to find out what questions they are asking in order to create content that provides value. There are a number of online tools that can be used to do this such as answerthepublic.com.
When using answer the public, simply type in the main topic of your website and it will return common questions based queries that people are searching for that are relevant to the topic. This is where the ideas for your blog posts should start.
Create A Schedule
Now that you have a clear idea of who your audience is and what they want to know, you will need to plan out your first lot of content ideas and when each blog will be posted. This could be anything from one months worth of content to three months worth, depending on how frequently you are planning to post.
However, it is important to plan your blog topics in advance as it can be difficult to set aside time to write a blog when you don’t even know what you’re going to write about. Additionally, creating a blogging schedule will help you to regularly post new blogs. And the more frequently updated your blog is, the higher your website rankings will be. This is due to the fact that search engines prefer fresh content.
When it comes to blog posts, the more frequently you post, the better. However, it is important to choose a schedule that you can maintain. If you decide on once a week, choose a day of the week and always upload your new blogs on that day rather than whenever they are completed. This allows regular readers of your blog to keep track of exactly when each new blog will be posted.
Step 2: Writing
Create An Attention Grabbing Blog Title
The title of a blog is one of the most important aspects of a blog post as this is the first thing that your potential customers will read. Based on the headline, the reader will decide whether or not to read the article. So no matter how much time you spend on creating a thoroughly researched and perfectly written article, if the headline doesn’t catch the attention of your target audience, no one will read it.
A well crafted headline should reflect the content of the article while piquing the attention of the reader. However, it is important not to create clickbait articles that over promise and under deliver, as this will cause readers to leave the website and to distrust your brand.
Blog titles should be written using the same language that your potential audience would use to search for that information. There are plenty of free tools available, such as Google’s Keyword Planner, that can be used to find keywords or phrases with high search volumes to include in the title of your blog. This will increase the traffic to your blog as there is already an audience searching for those terms.
Create Valuable Content
The measure of a good blog is not only how many people visit the page, but also the value that it provides to its intended audience. There are two reasons for this; firstly, if you are providing value to your readers, you will also be building brand trust and industry authority within your target audience. Secondly, search engines measure the usefulness of content based on site traffic, bounce rate, and how long a reader stays on the page. This means that no matter how much traffic you get to your blog, if your article is not providing value, users will quickly realise this and leave the website. This will increase your bounce rate and negatively impact your websites rankings.
Conversely, creating valuable content that answers readers questions about your products and industry will reduce bounce rate and build brand authority. Quality articles also have the potential of driving customers back through to the main site and increasing conversions and sales.
Include High Quality Images
Another way to optimise your blog posts is by including high quality, relevant images. In fact, the inclusion of supporting images such as photos, graphs, videos and infographics can greatly improve the performance of a blog post. Not only will adding an image break up long walls of text and provide an additional point of interest, creating informational images, such as infographics, allows readers to easily digest the information by breaking it up into small sections with supporting images.
Step 3: Monitoring
Measure Performance
Finally, when creating a business blog it is important to measure performance using tracking tools such as Google Analytics. This will allow you to keep track of which articles are the most popular, informing you on what kind of articles to continue creating. You can also use metrics tracked by Google Analytics to measure user engagement and whether or not users are continuing through to the main site from your blog posts. This information will inform you on how to optimise your blogs.
For example, if a blog post is getting a lot of traffic, but most of that traffic is never referred through to the main site, simply adding internal links from the article to the index page and product pages could increase conversion rate and sales.
Additionally, when creating a blog for a business website it is important that both the main site and the blog are on the same domain. This is because if your blog is on a seperate domain it will not be providing SEO value to your business website, and vice versa.
In summary, in order to get the most benefit from your blog it is important to know who your audience is and to your write the posts for them, as well as to monitor their response and engagement. This will allow you to build a relationship with your potential customers to drive more leads and close more sales.