Blogging is great for business. Through a blog, you provide useful and engaging information to an online community. This increases traffic to your site, establishes your brand as a source of knowledge, and even builds brand loyalty. In these ways, blogging also helps to drive sales. Let’s take a look at how you can grow your readership by tapping into new audiences and nurturing the old.
Produce quality content
Blog content comes at the top of the marketing funnel. This means that readers of blogs are exploring a problem or “pain point”. Blogs offer useful information to help users consider solutions and options. They help users take their next step along the buyer’s journey. For this reason, blogs must contain quality content. Grow your readership by making sure your content is useful. Then make your content even more engaging by making it interesting, friendly, funny or passionate. Keep your blogging regular to give your audience a consistent source of information they can rely on.
Pay attention to user experience
Another way to improve the quality of your blog content is by making sure you’ve got good user experience. User experience refers to how easy or pleasing your website is to use. Because readers are often looking for specific information about their pain point, your blog should by easy-to-read and scannable. Use clear simple language and break up the text into logical subheadings to help readers find what they’re looking for. Don’t forget an engaging headline and a body that delivers on your headline’s promote. This will minimise your “bounce rate”, i.e. the number of people who click away because they didn’t find what they expected on that page.
Promote, promote, promote
A blog isn’t going to attract readers simply by sitting in the corner of your website. You should use a multi-channel strategy to promote each post. We recommend starting with an email newsletter. Despite the popularity of social media, email marketing still has higher open and click-through rates. But in addition to promoting your blog through an email newsletter, use multiple social platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, or whatever is best for your business. If you have the budget, give your social media posts a boost through paid advertising to reach new audience and generate more clicks.
Include great images
Another way to boost the quality of your blog is by including images. Compared to traditional advertising (where headlines do most of the work to grab the audience’s attention), internet advertising relies on images. For example, the image is responsible for 70% of clicks on a Facebook ad. Keep this in mind when you’re posting your blog to social media: your image will do most of the work generating clicks to the blog itself. Images that perform best are original. Stock images, or even images that look like stock images, don’t perform as well. We recommend taking original photos of your product, service, office, or anything else that authentically represents your business, or is useful or interesting to your readership.
Make a guest appearance
Guest blogging is where you post a blog to another person’s site. You’ll address that blog’s usual audience, writing on a subject that interests them and that you are an expert in. You’ll have an opportunity to link to your website or product in your author bio, or even throughout the body, where appropriate. Guest blogging has a number of advantages. First, you get to tap into an existing audience and raise their awareness of your offering. Secondly, by creating “backlinks” which lead from one part of the web to your site, you boost your SEO.