Should I be blogging for my business?

Once upon a time, blogging was just for journalists, fashionistas, foodies and other people who though the world needed to hear what they had to say. Though bloggers became very influential, they remained within the ‘bloggosphere’ and few large corporations jumped on the blogging bandwagon.

Fast forward a few years however and things are very different. Thanks to the impact of social media and the influence of Google’s updated algorithms, blogging is now very much a tool for business. In fact, blogging is now so effective your company can no longer afford to ignore its power.

Google

If you’re trying to improve your company’s SEO and boost your URL up the Google rankings, incorporating a regular blog into your website is an absolute must. For a while now, Google has been favouring sites that keep their content fresh. Adding a weekly or monthly blog to your site shows Google that you’re maintaining and updating it. A blog is also an excellent chance to add more keywords to your site and fill it with information rich links and images.

Social media

Social media is an incredibly powerful - and affordable - marketing tool. Used properly, social media helps you to connect with your clients, build a personality for your company and create a loyal customer base. If you add a blog to your site, you can promote it on social media and show your customers that you’re an active participant in the network.

If your blog is interesting and relevant enough, the members of your social network will like and share it, boosting brand awareness and giving your business high quality marketing for free.

Growing your business

As well as being good for your company image, blogging is also great for business. A whopping 60% of companies who blog acquire more customers, a statistic that even the most cautious business owners can’t afford to ignore.

Building a relationship with customers

A blog is a great way to create a dialogue with customers and to build a solid business relationship. Through a blog, customers can get to know your company, your products and your services, ensuring that you’ll be the first name they think of next time they’re looking for anything you offer.

A blog also shows that you’re an authority in your area, giving existing and potential customers confidence in your abilities.

If you’re one of the many businesses that hasn’t yet embraced the blog, now’s the time to begin

Creative And Low-Cost Online Marketing Strategies

With so many companies vying for attention on the online marketplace, it’s becoming harder and harder to get through to your target audience. This is particularly true if you don’t have the seemingly limitless marketing budget of some of the biggest players. But this needn’t be a handicap: if you want your online customers to take notice of you then all you have to do is think a bit more creatively.

Here are some low-cost marketing ideas you may not have considered:

Find Niche Blogs: It’s a good idea to use other media platforms to gain exposure, but of course many smaller companies couldn’t expect to get on the front cover of a big trade magazine. Instead, what you could do is seek out niche blogs that appear to be popular and well-respected. You can then suggest that you write a guest article for them focusing on some particular issue related to your sector. This is a good way to spread your company’s name (because you can usually include a link to your website) and set yourself up as someone clients could turn to for advice.

Create YouTube Videos: YouTube has hundreds of millions of unique visitors each month, which makes it a pretty powerful platform for business marketing. It’s also free to use, so you should make the best use of it by putting together a great video. Make sure the headline uses the right keywords and that it has a clear call to action (such as encouraging the viewer to visit your website or subscribe to your channel). Try to be original and make it either useful or entertaining – nobody wants to watch another dull corporate overview of a company.

Get Endorsement: Yes, if you’re a small business you can probably rule out finding a major Hollywood star to come on board. But have you thought about sounding out local celebrities to see if they would be willing to endorse your business? These don’t have to be actors, singers or TV personalities – it could simply be somebody who is well-known in the local area as a positive role model. You can then send them a free gift or trial of your products and follow this up later on to see if they would be willing to write you a testimonial. People are much more likely to buy something if somebody they recognise and trust has given it a positive review.

Start LinkedIn Group: Creating your own professional network can set you up as a useful information resources while increasing the number of visitors to your site and building up new contacts. Add to this to the fact that it’s free to do and there’s really no good reason no to. Just remember that this is a networking resource: at no point should you be attempting the hard sell.

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.