No one piece of marketing is likely to breed the greatest results possible if it is undertaken as an isolated task with no strategy behind it. Social media alone can get results but it will achieve so much more when linked in with other aspects of marketing and done in a strategic way based on your business goals and objectives.
One aspect that we encourage all businesses to include in their strategy is content marketing. This can include blogging, video, infographics, social media and articles. When you include an effective content marketing plan as part of your overall strategy you can expect results.
A good definition of content marketing is: the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
It’s very much about taking what you know and putting it out to the masses through the available channels. The most popular way of doing this is by blogging. It is beneficial to every business to have a blog included on their website for these two reasons:
With this in mind, here are 10 simple tips to help you blog well…
Ensure that your blog is on your business website and not on a separate site. One of the main benefits of blogging is that it helps your Google standing and will drive traffic to your website. If your blog is running from a different site, you are missing out on improving your standing and most importantly, new clients.
We cannot tell you how many times we have clients who decide they are going to start blogging two or three times a week and then within a few weeks it has all ended.
Start with one business blog a fortnight or even a month and become consistent at that. Once you have developed the habit you can then increase the posts if you wish. We would all like to be blogging five times a week but often time and resources don’t allow for this. Start with what is manageable and be known for being consistent.
OK, we will say it – too many blogs are just plain boring.
Be as creative as you can be. Make your titles interesting and catchy, include images, videos and whatever will help catch the reader’s attention.
Don’t think about selling in your business blog, instead think about adding value. How can you help your potential clients? What do your target audience need to know? Write your blogs to add value and you will be amazed how much traction you can get.
Moving on from point 4, you can include a small sales orientated call to action at the end of each post. For example, if your blog is about how to write a good business blog post, then at the end tell the readers how you can help them add a blog to their website and even help them with their content (I think we just went against tip 4).
Never have a text only blog.
Choose a nice, bright image to go with your post. It will help bring your text to life and when sharing on social media will help improve your click through rate.
To maximise your SEO then you need to optimise your posts. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, then this will be pretty straight forwards for you. For each post ensure you rewrite your meta description to suit. As much as possible use keywords in the meta description and add alt tags to all your images. It all helps!
When writing your post include keywords in your content. Don’t overdo it, you still want it to be a good read but where you can do include them.
The optimum amount of words for a post is around 600-800 words so if you aim there, you won’t go far wrong.
A great business blog post is not great unless people are reading it and sharing it.
Once your blog is written share it on your social media channels and not just once. Share it in Facebook and LinkedIn groups and whatever you have access to. Also, add it as an article on LinkedIn to help spread the coverage. Don’t be shy and get word out!
As promised, here is our CTA. Here at Choose Purple we help companies just like yours improve on their digital marketing. We can help you add a blog to your website end even produce the posts for you if you struggle for time and creativity. Just get in touch.
