Do you have a business blog? Are you happy with the role it’s playing in your marketing plan?
A lot of businesses still see running a blog as ‘the cost of doing business’ – in other words, they aren’t sure what it does, but they are afraid to stop doing it in case it has a negative impact. Today we want to show you how to stop your blog becoming a cost of business, and turn it into the hub of your content marketing plan. But first, let’s start at the begining.
Why Are Blogs Important?
Since Google launched its assault on keyword stuffing and bad link building, blogs have taken their place as the king of internet marketing. Google wants good quality, shareable content, and blogs are the perfect platform to do that.
Some of the most popular reasons to get a company blog started are:
Blogs are great for SEO.
For Google, content is king, and there is no better way of boosting your search engine rankings than regularly updating your site with fresh content. Even the blogs formatting works in your favour – with Google searching for subtle (not overdone) keywording and headings to identify subjects. They also allow you to link to internal and external sites effectively, and will move you up the rankings.
Blogs are a form of social media.
In fact, this study by HubSpot shows that many businesses with a working company blog value it above other forms of social media marketing.
Blogs to drive sales.
As well as being a fantastic platform for brand awareness and even as a sales tool. You can write blog posts about how to use your products, show them in context or talk about the value of your services. You can also use this opportunity to provide internal links to your products pages, or external ones if you prefer.
So How Do I Make My Blog A Content Marketing Hub?
Know Your Audience
Before you start putting a foundation together and write blogs, first think about your audience. Who are you writing for, and what are they interested in reading? What kind of persona or voice would they find most appropriate? What social media and content consumption habits do they have?
Put Together A Plan
Having a firm content plan in place is essential if you want a strong blog that will yield results. Personal blogs can get away with rambling on tangents and not having much of a relationship between one post and the next – but with your business blog it does. So make sure you know when your promotions are, when you want to theme posts and what you want to talk about. We recommend you plan out at least 6 months of topics in advance to keep you on track.
Optimise Your Content
Once you’ve finished writing your blogs post – that isn’t the end. You still need to make it attractive to readers, and to Google. Make sure your text is optimised for search engines with proper headings, break your content into bite sized chunks to it is easy to read and include pictures to stop it looking like one big block of text.
Think About How You Will Promote It
Congratulations – your blogs is now on your website! But what do you do now? Well, as we said before a blog is a great way to get people on to your site – but they need to find the blog first! So how will you promote it? Via social networks like LinkedIn or twitter? Maybe including the link in your newsletters, or even listing it on a blog aggregation site? The choices are endless, but it’s important to get your blog out there and get it read!