A very big “Thank You” for all your feedback and various questions, I am always very happy to hear from you so please keep them coming.
This week, I am honouring one of my reader’s requests to give some information on “How to Blog for Your Business”. I won’t assume that we all know the benefits of blogging, so I will start by talking about what your business can gain from blogging and How to do this successfully.
The Basics
The word blog is a short form for “web log”. Writing or maintaining a blog is known as blogging, the articles are called posts, blog posts or blog entries and the blog owner is known as a blogger.
There are various blogging platforms including WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Tumblr, blogger, Typepad and Live Journal.
Some Benefits of Blogging
1. Credibility
When you provide blog posts that are well-written, informative and useful, you build credibility for yourself and / your business.
2. Better Ranking with Search engines
Consistent blogging keeps your site current, fresh and dynamic thereby increasing the chances of your website getting ranked higher on search engines such as Google and Alexa (especially if you use the “right keywords” for your business), performing well in search results and also provides inbound links to your site when others share your content.
3. Engagement with your Potential clients
Blogging gives you the opportunity to engage with your customers on a regular basis – they hear from you, they can comment on your blog, ask you questions as well as share your information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Google+ and twitter thereby expanding your market and increasing your customer reach.
4. Quick and Low cost – Marketing
Blogging is a cost effective way of marketing your products and services online. It is also much less time-consuming as you are able to publish information to all your visitors and readers in as little as a few minutes.
5. Potential content for your business
As they say, content is King! A blog can be turned into content for your business such as videos, books, e-books, audios which you can then use as marketing messages, FREEBIES or even products for your business in the future.
3 Top Tips for Successful Business Blogging
1. Write good content
Be conversational in your writing. Make sure you write in a way that engages your audience, in language that they will understand, try to avoid jargon and technical language except you know that your audience will understand this.
Also, make sure to give information that is useful to your audience (and awesome!); this will keep them coming back for more. For example, if your target market is mums who need to lose weight, write about healthy foods and exercise that will help them do this, not about exotic holidays they can go on.
2. Promote your Blog
If you have a blog and you don’t promote it, quite simply you won’t get any visitors to your blog and in turn won’t get any sales conversions from your blog / site.
Whenever you put an article on your blog, you need to let your target market know about this “useful information” that you have prepared for them. One way of doing this is by creating profiles for your business on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked_In, Stumbleupon, Digg, Reddit and then sharing the information these platforms, with your target market and with links back to your blog.
You should also submit your articles to article databases such as ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, goarticles.com, knol.google.com and squidoo.com
Lastly, you should submit your best blog posts to Blog Carnivals. Blog Carnivals gather like minded blog posts, categorize them and then index them into segmented web pages that are easy for readers to find. A good example is BlogCarnival.com
3. Measure Your Results
Finally, analyse the feedback you get from each blog post. This might be texts, comments on your blog, Facebook comments, ReTweets on twitter, emails, whatever form it comes in, keep a record and analyse it. Compare feedback from various topics, various writing styles and also blog posts written at various times. This way, you will know what your target audience like, what makes them react, what makes they want to talk to you, what type of questions they are asking, when they like to hear from you and much more!
WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE ON YOUR WEBSITE OR NEWSLETTER?You can as long as you include this complete blurb with it: Tobi Awoyemi is a Small Business Start-up and Marketing Consultant who helps women Turn their Passion into Money-making Businesses. Get her FREE TRAINING and articles on www.TobiAwoyemi.com