Why Blogging Helps Your Business
Have you noticed all the business blogs out there? Wondering if a business blog could help your business? Yes, it can! Business Blogging is an extremely effective form of inbound marketing and online exposure for your business. Not only does blogging give you a platform to get your business messages out there, but it also allows you to create keyword links to your business. In short, blogging helps your business exposure and traffic as well as building your business search engine rankings.
With all the distractions there is online right now, people’s attention spans have never been so low. However, as people are spending more time on their mobile phones, implementing an inbound marketing campaign is going to create awareness, interest, and consideration which are all at the top of the inbound marketing funnel. The buyer’s journey starts with becoming aware and learning more about your products and services.
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Choosing Your Blogging Platform
First, you must choose your blogging platform. There are lots of blogging options available. If you are just starting out on a no to low budget, you are in luck. You can actually create a free blog with Blogger! There are lots of free templates and you can do upgrades to the design spending minimally. Blogger is fabulous and I used it myself when I was just starting out and getting the feel for how everything worked.
If you are serious about your business and you have any kind of budget to work with, I suggest purchasing your own domain name and using WordPress. Why spend money when you can do it for free? Because WordPress gives you way more control over your blog. Most importantly you can improve the SEO of your blog and articles and this means that your search engine rank will likely be higher as a result. You can use free plug-ins for this or purchase ones that help you even more.
This really is an area to invest in so that all the effort you spend blogging will be seen by more people. Moreover, you will own an asset as opposed to building a digital marketing campaign on some else’s platform which might close their business or shut down your blog for various reasons.
What To Blog About
What you choose to blog about is, of course, essential to your business! To be most successful, your blog needs to be informative and useful and not just in your face with sales. If you sell kids’ clothes, you can provide articles that are useful to parents, such as a packing list for camp, with a few keyword links that lead customers directly to your sales pages. It is OK for some posts to be centered around new products you receive or market trends but remember it needs to be something interesting and informative to draw readers.
Don’t forget to make good use of your keywords in your post. If you title your article something you think is cute and catchy, it may not be as effective as a title that includes the keywords that the article is focused on so that search engines can locate it. Think about the words you choose and make sure they are what your customer will be searching for.
How Often To Blog
So how often should you blog? The more the merrier, as long as it is quality content. It would be great if you could post once a day. I would say it is absolutely essential to post once a week to build consistency and blog following. Shoot for a blog post that is around 500 words of interesting valuable content that also contains your messages and links.
Don’t Think You Can Handle Blogging Yet?
Now, you understand that blogging can give your business increased exposure. You know that blogging will improve your traffic and search engine ranking and still you are not sure you can handle it? You can also find already established blogs to feature your business or your guest post and get many of the same benefits. Be consistent with this strategy too as the more exposure and links the better!
If you don’t have time to do it yourself, you have two options. Option number one would be to hire an SEO agency (more on that in a bit). Option number two is to hire a freelance writer. There are a lot of portals where you can find a good writer. Upwork and Guru are a great place to start. A great writer can charge anything from $35 to $100 per in-depth article.
Hiring An SEO Agency To Do It For You
If you think that your time is better spent managing your business you can always hire a search engine optimization company for small businesses to do the guest blogging for you. The pricing depends on the quality and domain authority of the blogs. Some firms charge between $1000 and $3000 a month for a guest post outreach campaign which should get you at least 15 to 30 articles published on high authority websites like Huffington Post. Always ask for work examples before hiring an SEO firm. Learn to inspect what you expect!
Blogging Bonuses for Your Business Bottom Line
- You can make pretty penny from Google AdSense if you chose to add it to your blog.
- You can charge for banner ads.
- You can charge for guest posts.
- You can sign up with a cost per action network and get paid when your readers click their links.
Ready to give blogging a try?
