The following statistics might have impressed you about having a business blog for your website.
- B2B marketers who use blogs generate 67% more leads than those that do not.
- 81% of companies consider their blogs “useful,” “important,” or “critical”.
- 37% of marketers say blogs are the most valuable type of content marketing.
- By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationships without talking to a human.
- Companies who blog receive 97% more links to their website.
Most people have the impression that they need more traffic to their website.
The more traffic they get the more business or successful they think their website is.
There are two major amplification method businesses can use to drive traffic to their website. They can leverage either pay for traffic or grow their traffic organically.
Paid traffic works, but it’s not sustainable. Once your budget dries up, your traffic usually trickles down to a halt.
Businesses are then forced to turn to organic traffic to grow their traffic.
The major challenge with organic traffic is that it is a slow and gradual process which depends on lots of variables like how strong the competition is, Google constant changing algorithm and other factors like seasonal changes in customer behaviour.
One of the things you can do is to start a blog. Blogging as a means of increasing visibility is an easy concept to understand.
But like every other thing, simply getting a blog won’t help you. You need to understand the intricacies of how blogging works and how you can correctly apply it to grow your business and not only your traffic.
How Not to Fail At Blogging
Ignore yourself and Your Ego
Most businesses see their blog as a place to rant about how awesome they are. They talk about the latest awards, office expansion etc. Yes, you can! There is a place for that. It is called announcement.
But if you are serious about growing your business through blogging, you need to know that 90% of your traffic seriously doesn’t care. They want resources that can help them solve their needs or are helpful. They want to know about all this other things when you have gained their trust by investing in contents that are of immense benefit to them. Only then will they care if your new office is located on an island or behind your garage.
Understand blogging is actually part of content marketing
Another major reason small business with blogging is simply because they forget that blogging is a part of a complex mix called content marketing. In content marketing, you are going to invest not only in creating a blog but you are going to invest a greater amount of time in promoting and marketing it.
Your blog is one of the media where you can produce and market content about your industry, business, services and products.
Understand the 3 different types of content for your blog
For me, I see this as where 99 out of every 100 businesses miss it. Producing content for your blog can be divided into three types.
The first type of content is content that indirectly market to your target audience. These are those contents that establish you as a thought-leader in your industry, thereby making you the go-expert. They usually are articles that help your audience or customers gain a deeper understanding of your industry or solve the problems they are having. Sometimes it could be content your audience are simply interested in. For example, a travel blog could talk about the perfect destination for couples celebrating their 20th year anniversary.
The second type of contents that you should invest in are contents to build links which indirectly build organic visibility: These types of contents are designed to help you gain higher ranking in search engines which in turn results into greater visibility for your business. These contents are not your regular type of contents. They are usually awesome guides and resources that people find so useful, they mention it, share it and even link to it. These types of contents are not the kind you produce every single day.
The final type of contents you should invest in is contents that help your customers understand and use your product wisely. These kinds f content usually directly promote your services or products. These are announcements, press releases, guides on using your products or services.
Lack of consistency
Lastly, another mistake business make when it comes to blogging is their lack of consistency. I am not an advocate of writing content for your blog simply because you have to. But when you have a blog that has not being updated for over one year, then you have a greater problem on your hand. Like everything else, the more consistent you are with creating valuable content on your blog, the greater and higher the chances that your blog will be successful.
Successful blogs comes from a business model mindset that understands that the primary purpose of a blog is to “attract”, “nurture” and “keep” customers.
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