Blogging generates 67% more leads for businesses. This is just one of the numerous benefits of blogging for your business. Tons of small and big businesses have increased lead generation, customer engagement, and revenue with blogging.
But here’s the thing:
When done wrong, blogging may turn out to be a waste of precious time and energy.
That said, successful blogging is no rocket science.
Let’s break down how to write a successful blog that also promotes your business and leaves you smiling to the bank, shall we?
Before you write a word…
To write a successful blog, there are some things you must do even before you publish any content.
- Identify your Audience
Identifying your target audience is essential for every part of your business, and your blog is not left out. Knowing your audience can help you define:
- The most helpful content to post on your blog
- The ideal voice to resonate with your audience
- Your keyword research
- The perfect graphics and content format
- The right content marketing strategies.
This is the first and a very crucial step to achieving success with your blogging. Getting this step right puts you ahead of millions of competitors.
- Create a Content Calendar
If you wish to consistently supply your audience with relevant content, then creating a content calendar is not negotiable. The calendar should contain the topics you’ll post through a specific period, and the days you’ll post them. Ideally, you should post at least once a week. But you can do so bi-weekly if that’s what works for you. The key here is sticking to your calendar.
Pro Tip:
Embrace flexibility sometimes. If you’ve outlined a particular topic to post and you notice an industry trend or a rising pain point among your audience that needs immediate attention, address it. This can potentially shoot traffic through the roof and earn you some regular readers.
- Keep your Content Relevant and Valuable
This needs no explanation. Valuable content keeps your visitors coming back for more. This is an offshoot of the first point treated – know your audience. That way, you can know what they’ll find valuable.
The Writing…
Here’s everything you need to know about actually “writing” a successful blog that also promotes your business.
- Employ a Conversational Writing Style
Here’s a simple trick to help you write better:
Imagine you’re chatting with a friend at a café over a cup of coffee. You speak casually and in plain language. That’s exactly how you should write. Merely writing “you are” instead of “you’re” can leave a bump in your blog visitor’s reading journey. And these bumps may make them go and never come back.
- Keep it Interesting and Easy to Read
With so many things battling for our attention, readers are becoming increasingly impatient. Your posts should hook your readers right from the introduction. This ensures they don’t close your page as soon as they land on it and then makes Google algorithm think:
This is a good page; we should probably “rank” it for more people to see.
Another way to keep your readers glued to your page is by keeping it easy to skim. You can do this by:
- Avoiding long sentences.
- Using short paragraphs
- Breaking block of texts with images
- And generally employing a lot of white space.
This way, reading your blog post won’t seem overwhelming.
Also, use simple words. After writing, you can check your post’s readability score with the Hemingway App. Aim for grade 4 standard.
Finally, each post should be as long as necessary but not longer than necessary. If you can address a pain point with 500 words, there’s no point writing 2000 words. If you’ve got longer posts, consider serializing them and then using hyperlinks, which is also great for your website’s SEO.
- SEO Best Practices
If you want your content to ever get found on the internet, you must adhere to basic SEO practices.
First and quite importantly, you have to research your keyword phrase – that’s the phrase typed as a search query by search engine users.
The goal here is to:
Make sure you’re writing for a keyword phrase that people are actually searching by. You don’t want to write simply because you ‘think’ people search by that phrase. If you do, you’ll be wrong many times, and your post will fall flat on its face.
Another data you should pay attention to is a keyword’s competition level. For best results, search for high volume but low competition keywords. Done rightly, it could be the fast lane to website traffic.
Many easy-to-use tools can help you with this. Some of the best and most renowned include:
UberSuggest, Google Keyword Planner, and Neil Patel’s free tool.
After you write…
- Promote! Promote!! Promote!!!
An experienced blogger states it simply but succinctly :
“…always promote your content.” Alex Savy, Founder of Sleepingocean.com and Comfynorth.ca.
The easiest way to be unsuccessful with your business blog is to have the idea that:
I just have to publish content; they’ll find me.
While traffic will flow on its own accord with time, you have to do a lot of promotion at the beginning.
Map out a content promotion strategy, and feed your content to your ideal audience.
- Keep your Blog Interactive
It is important to keep your website visitors engaged. Encourage them to leave questions and comments, and when they do, don’t be too busy to reply. It helps build relationships with your visitors and convert them to customers.
- Analyze Performance and Tweak
Use a website stats tool like Google Analytics to keep track of your blog’s performance. Understanding analytics can help your business in more ways than one. With so much information at your fingertips, you can continuously tweak and improve things for your blog.
Finally, while blogging can considerably help promote your business, you have to be patient and consistent. In the beginning, it may seem slow, but don’t give up. In no distant future, your blog will be successful and your business will gross more income.
Now that you’ve read up to this point, leave your No. 1 takeaway from this article in the comment section. Happy blogging!
