Just building a website is not enough in today’s society to keep your site in the top rankings of Google. Blogging allows you to target keywords consumers would use to find your business or answer questions they have about your industry or products.
Having a blog gives your followers a reason to visit your website on a regular basis. According to Hubspot both B2C and B2B companies see business benefits – more traffic and leads – when they blog frequently, compared to companies that blog infrequently or not at all.
A company blog will also allow you to increase the number of relevant inbound links that will direct readers to the main parts of your website. This, along with SEO, will allow you to increase traffic to your website and the length of time that visitors spend on your site. You may even gain new customers as a result.
As beneficial as it is, many entrepreneurs and business owners avoid blogging because they feel they can’t write, but this doesn’t have to hold you back. Using a virtual assistant can help you achieve a successful blog. VA’s assist with topic research, keyword optimization, blog commenting and can act as your ghostwriter. Without a doubt, great content is the essential part of your blog as it drives your viewers.
The secret to successful blogging is to create posts that are unique and valuable to the reader. You don’t necessarily have to be a great writer, but instead, hold that mystery ingredient other blogs in your industry lack. Even one blog post a week with a unique approach that’s delivered to add value and information to your readers will produce benefits.
If you’re not sure what to blog about, create product tutorials to show your products in action. If you can, include real-life videos of customers using your products and feature reviews. Offer advice regarding your products to promote the customer experience.
Whenever you search on Google, you’ll see suggested topics as Google auto-completes your query with a longer phrase. This could be a great place to find possible blog topics related to your field. The Google Keyword Planner is the bread and butter tool for researching keywords. It’s part of AdWords, but you don’t need to advertise on AdWords to use it, this can be a good source for topic ideas based on high ranking keywords. Google Trends also makes suggestions, but mostly it shows the trending for phrases over time. It’s useful for checking the seasonality of trending words.
Having a company blog is only the first step to getting the most out of content marketing. To truly reap the rewards of an engaged audience, you need to create valuable content and publish it consistently to keep your followers coming back and sharing your posts.
Thanks for reading, until next month.
Angela