What Are The Benefits Of Business Blogging?

Despite the number of successful bloggers out there, many people still aren’t convinced of its benefits for online marketing. After all, they say, all you are doing is writing articles – you are not actually ‘selling’ your product so how can this grow your business? The answer is that you are selling the image of your company – the idea of yourself as a brand. And in this oversaturated global marketplace, this is a crucial differentiating factor. If you’re still not convinced, here are just some of the many key benefits of business blogging: 

Increasing Client Base: It’s hard to attract new clients if your website isn’t regularly updated because your search engine rankings will fall. A regularly updated, well-written blog is a great way to keep your site fresh without having to spend a lot of time changing the graphics. Furthermore, if your blog addresses specific problems faced by your customer base then they will come to trust you as an expert in your field and are more likely to be converted into paying clients rather than casual visitors.

Increasing Your Writing Prospects: If you are already running a business but want to become a published author in your field of expertise to boost your personal brand then a blog is a great way to start. For one thing, it’s a regular discipline that helps you to become a better, more fluent writer. If you engage with customers by encouraging comments it will also help you to discover what people like to read and what they don’t. By the time you come to write your book you will have gained a lot of knowledge of your customer base and hopefully also built up a ready-made audience to buy your book. A large number of online followers always sits well with potential publishers.

Building A Network: If your blog is well written then hopefully you will start to build up your own online network to engage with through both your website and social media platforms. Not only will this hopefully increase your client base, it also gives you access to other experts with whom you can share advice and information. It’s good to have this kind of mutual support in today’s competitive market environment.

Improving SEO: Contrary to what many believe, search engine rankings are still important. After all, search engines are still there to deliver results that will be useful and relevant to their users. If you write valuable articles around a particular topic to a consistently high standard then search engines will recognise this and your search engine rankings will rise accordingly.

How To Make Article Marketing Work For You

When it comes to article marketing, it’s important to have high quality, unique content.  Simply submitting content to article sites will not do you any favours unless it offers a new viewpoint, addresses a genuine issue or offers useful advice.

There may be links to your website from poor quality articles, but this is no good if nobody bothers to read till the end. In fact they can do you more harm than good: if the article is very badly written it will tend to reflect badly on your company. Here, then, is what to do to ensure that your article marketing has the effect you intended:

Writing Quality Articles: This is the most important rule to remember: before you start posting your content onto articles sites, test it out on your own website first and see how customers respond. If you are writing pieces that are useful to your website visitors then you can be fairly confident that potential customers who have not yet seen your website will also find them helpful. And don’t just hide them away in your ‘blog’ section (many customers won’t bother clicking on that), display them prominently on your home or product pages with catchy titles that will get people reading.

Getting Article Ideas: If you are struggling with the above because you simply can’t come up with any strong article ideas, don’t panic: this is a skill that can take a while to master. A good way of generating ideas is to do a search using the most relevant product or service keywords for you and seeing what kinds of information people are looking for. You could also look in forums related to your industry sector and find out what the big topics are at the moment or what kinds of problems people are struggling with: you can then base your article around this.

Make It A Collaboration: You may find that you don’t have the time to write all the articles yourself, and this is not a problem either. In fact, it’s good to get another perspective from time to time if you’re running low on ideas. You can encourage your employees to contribute their own articles. If they are heavily involved in marketing and selling your products then they will probably have plenty to say. You could even ask your customers if they would like to contribute content, along the lines of ‘tips on how to use these products’. Finally, if you’re really struggling to produce enough content, you can hire writers in to create it for you. Just make sure they have knowledge of the subject and can create engaging content.

Top Tips For A Strong SEO Strategy

We’ve all read the articles telling us that SEO is dead and we should be looking at other ways to promote our businesses online. The truth lies somewhere in the middle: yes, it’s becoming increasingly important to create high-quality content rather than playing the keywords numbers game.
But SEO is still an important part of your online marketing strategy – you just have to think about it in new ways.

Here, to give you some idea of what this might involve, are some of keys to successful SEO in today’s marketplace:

Headlines: You may have a well-written post, but it’s useless if the headline doesn’t make people click through to it. It has to strike the right balance between being interesting and truthful at the same time: people are getting more savvy about click-bait headlines these days so if they go through to a link and the article isn’t actually about what the headline suggests it is they will quickly navigate away from the page. So pick the most salient points, make the headline snappy, clever if possible and ensure the phrase appeals to your target audience.

Original Content: SEO is no longer just about getting any content at all up there as long as it contains your keywords: the aim is to create original, engaging and entertaining content. Remember that to build your brand you want people to share your posts and they won’t do this is if they’re read it all a thousand times before. Thinks of new ways to present your information, use images and present answers to common problems your target audience may have. That’s the way to get a post to go viral.

Inbound Links: Creating your own content is important, but you should also have plenty of other tools in your online marketing arsenal. Bear in mind that there are plenty of other ways to get inbound links to your site and you should be exploring these. Guest blogging has been a popular thing to do in recent years, although you need to be picky and find someone who adds value to your brand. You can also try using content delivery networks such as Taboola, which can also be instrumental in bringing in more traffic. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, this is a kind of automated service that places your content on sites that reach your target audience. Some companies like to share content with links to their site on community platforms such as Reddit.