Starting a business blog is something that can help you achieve 3 things: communicate and engage with your customers, to build a brand and to generate more sales. Many business blogs focus on generating bulk traffic or they participate because they feel it is what they should be doing, but aren’t quite sure of the purpose. This results in a lack of direction and it can be hard to draw any conclusions on how effective the blog is for the business.
We’ve been helping businesses to create content and blog strategies for their websites in order increase enquiries and sales. I’ve put together the key points we use to in order to have the biggest effect when trying to gain strong results from blogging activity.
The importance of posting relevant content
Blogging on only relevant and niche content is something you may be scared of doing because it limits your audience. There is no need to worry as you don’t want the whole world interested in your business blog; only those who actually fits in as your ideal customer. So posting content that interests them is a better idea instead of posting on broad and random subjects.
Statistics show that posting on ‘niche’ content causes a decrease in traffic by 218% but an increase in income by 692%. Posting content should be done only after fine-tuning what your target audience is interested in. You need to be specific. Going too broad will only end up confusing your ideal customers and not give them any reason to return as a regular reader.
Guest-posting your best content
Does your business blog get hundreds of thousands of visitors every month? In most cases, probably not and this is why omitting this content from your blog and posting it on someone else’s more popular blog is a smart move, especially as you establish yourself. Guest posting is a great way of generating eyeballs and if you can avoid the mistake of posting thin content on guest posts it will refer traffic back to your main blog site.
Submitting a guest-post with topical amazing niche content to blogs like Forbes, Huffington Post and Entrepreneur Magazine will have far more reach and give you huge exposure. Such guest-posting will not only get your business blog a lot more readers, but it will also drive relevant and targeted traffic to it and generate more leads for you.
Convince and ‘train’ your readers
Converting your readers into customers is very hard unless you can train and encourage them to buy. If you are giving your content away for free (which is the only way to go about it when blogging), they will psychologically be expecting you to give away your products and services for free as well. That is why you should train them to buy. This sounds a bit strange but is a very real phenomenon.
You can overcome this by asking them to take small steps and actions that train them to commit to you. There are many ways to go about it including asking them to share your great content every at the end of each blog post, ask them to give you their email address in return for a piece of great content or an in depth version of a blog post. By encouraging readers to take action they will be much less resistant to make a commitment and make a purchase from you.
Consistency
Sometimes when your traffic levels have plateaued, you lose the urgency to be consistent. But that is not a good idea. Just because it is flat, does not mean that it will not go down, right? Being consistent is something you need to learn if you want your business blog to be the success it can be. Create a blog calendar to ensure you meet your own deadlines and provide regular updates for your users to digest.
Engaging with your visitors
Your business blog’s revenue will increase if you can engage with your visitors and build up a friendly relationship with them. The best and easiest way to make this happen is to respond to people’s comments on your blog posts. The truth is that very few bloggers respond to comments. The repeat visit by readers will increase your blog traffic. Building a connection with your readers will keep them coming back for more and drive revenue and sales.
Get Visitors
Without any visitors to your blog or website, making money is impossible. It is true that your traffic is going to increase given time, but do you really have time to increase it organically? The answer is no. That is why you can leverage social media to help you promote the content of your blog.
Just sharing your own content from your own profiles will not do. You need your friends, co-workers and acquaintances to share your content as well. Spending money on Facebook ads is a really effective way of getting the eyeballs you need and this does not mean you need to spend a lot of money.
Conclusion
Business blogging is not complex. It just needs a strategic direction, time to create good content and patience as traffic and leads build up. The above factors are a great start to propel your business blog to ongoing success and results.
