The power of blogging is well-known. Over 90% of marketers consider it a valuable asset to invest in.
It can help build your customer base if you know how to do it correctly.
Here’s what you need to know about starting and continuing your company blog:
Your Blog’s Purpose
Before you begin the blog, think about what its true purpose is. This should be something specific that you can work toward with the blog.
It might be to add SEO value to your company site for better search engine results and more sales. It might be communicating with new and existing customers for stronger relationships with them. It could be establishing the company as an industry leader.
Whatever the purpose of the blog is, that’s what you build on in order to help your blog reach your end goals. This step is the most important one, so don’t skip past it.
Your Blog’s Audience
It’s tough to write a blog if you don’t know who you’re writing it for. That’s why it’s so important to use your blog’s purpose to figure out who your audience is.
Think about who you need to reach in order to meet your goals. Once you have a target audience in mind, it will be far easier to come up with topics to write about for that audience.
Brainstorm Blog Post Topics
With your purpose in mind and your audience well-defined, it’s time to come up with the perfect topics to write about.
To find out what they’re interested in reading about, the questions they have, and their biggest challenges – simply take a look at what they are searching for.
A quick way to do this is to use the People Also Ask box in Google to find out what people are asking about when it comes to your topic.
Create Highly Relevant Content
The content you create must be highly relevant and cover all of the sub-topics your audience cares about.
To make sure that it is relevant enough, use a content optimization tool to write just the right content that your audience wants.
This helps you to easily create content that your readers are looking for.
Having this relevant content is important because it impacts whether people will engage with your content, and this in turn influences how your content ranks on Google.
Host Your Blog
Many business bloggers start at this step, but it’s important to complete the previous steps before moving to the technical aspects of setting up a blog.
Once you are clear on goals, know what to write about, and have your target audience in mind, you can go to the nuts and bolts of the blog. The first thing to consider is where to host your blog. Luckily there are a number of affordable hosting options.
The one you choose should balance the level of customization you need as well with the skill level required to set it up.
A few good options include WordPress, Medium, and Webflow. WordPress and Webflow are highly customizable but can be more challenging to set up. Medium is easy to set up but less customizable.
Promote Your Blog
With your blog started, it’s time to begin promoting it. Without promotion, it will struggle to generate any meaningful traffic.
One way of promotion is by guest blogging. Guest blogging allows you to piggy-back off the audience of a more popular blog while also building valuable domain authority for your site.
Social media is another valuable promotion channel. Posting a new link and write-up every time there’s a new blog post is helpful. The key is to choose social media sites that are popular with your demographic.
Another must is to promote the blog through your email list. Send out a newsletter when there is a new post and include the first third of the post. To read more, they will have to go to the blog.
It’s also a good idea to enter into partnerships to get more links and drive more traffic. A partnership is generally a mutually beneficial arrangement where you and a marketing partner mutually promote each other. This can be a powerful way to reach a whole new audience.
By following all of these steps, you can create a marketing powerhouse that builds your company’s reputation and creates name recognition.
