When I speak to a lot of business owners they think that writing a blog is only for teenagers who want to write about their opinions; they don’t see the benefits of having a blog for their business – that is until I’ve explained the benefits. You will find out in this chapter why blogging is not only important but an essential tool for keeping your site high on search engine rankings.
For anyone who doesn’t know what a blog is, it is defined as a regularly updated website or webpage. As a business owner you will almost certainly have a website, ask yourself, “When was the last time I updated my website?” If you’re answer is along the lines of:
- “I can’t remember”
- “A few months ago”
- “I haven’t updated the site since it was first put online”
Then blogging is for you. The reason for this is quite simple; search engines love fresh, unique content. If your competitors consistently create great new content and you do not they will almost certainly be ranked higher than you, receive more traffic and gain new customers/clients that could have been yours.
Unique content is one of the most important parts of blogging. The main search engines have some of the most incredible algorithms and detectors, so if you copy and paste information from another online source onto your website they will find out and usually pretty fast. The penalty for this type of action is demotion of your website, the complete opposite of what you wanted to achieve when you got started with blogging. If you are thinking about just copying and pasting content from another source then you are genuinely better off not blogging at all! The penalty in my opinion is fair, when you put time to one side and create new content for your website I’m sure you would be pretty annoyed if you started seeing it on the sites of your competitors.
Most entrepreneurs who are new to blogging often struggle with what they’re going to write about, many feel that they don’t have anything to say. As an entrepreneur you will be a fountain of knowledge within your sector; you will know things that other people don’t you just need to think about what knowledge you have and don’t assume that everyone already knows what you know – they probably don’t.
As mentioned, unique, fresh content is good so if you’re doing a weekly blog saying what’s happened in your business that week then that is generally OK for a blog but I’m going to show you how to create blogs that supercharge your websites SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and can be found by people using a search engine. This means that you website can be getting visitors to your blog from potential customers who would have otherwise not found your website.
Firstly SEO, this is for the majority the whole reason of writing a blog, it is done to get your website higher on Google. In order for this to happen you need to ensure that your websites keywords are in your blog, for example if you ran a furniture business and one of your main keywords was wardrobe then you would want that keyword within the blog. This has to be done sensibly, again search engines are pretty smart, if you just write nonsense and cram content full of your keywords you will be found out and your site will almost certainly be demoted as a result. A good blog for this type of business might be ‘How to pick the right wardrobe for you’ and then write about wardrobes. With this type of blog the content might be 300-500 words in length (300 words is usually the minimum if you want your blog to be found by a search engine) and you could probably get the keyword wardrobe into the blog between 3 -8 times. It is important to note that blogging does not provide immediate results, from the blog being published it can take between 2 weeks to 3 months for your blog to be indexed and your website to be updated by the search engines. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see results immediately, writing a good quality blog that contains your websites keywords is laying the foundations for your websites long term success.
Blogs are a great opportunity to place internal links within your website, which search engines love. If the business mentioned above had written a blog on wardrobes he/she might mention a specific type of wardrobe that they sell. When mentioning this particular wardrobe a clickable link can be added which readers can press to take them to view the product. This is a success on two fronts; firstly you achieve internal links and secondly you are directing people who are clearly interested in your products (as they’re reading about them) directly to the page where they can purchase the product they’re reading about.
Moving onto the second part of deciding what to write about, don’t do what most people do and assume they know what people want to read. Do research! My favourite way of doing this is to go to a search engine as they’re incredibly helpful now by giving suggestions based on the most frequent searches; start typing in your product/services letter by letter and see what suggestions come up. It is also good to add words like ‘who’ ‘how’ and ‘why’ before you enter the letters of your service as it gives more results and shows you what people are searching for.
Remember that the job of a search engine is to bring together a person seeking information to the best website with the most relevant information. As a business blogger your job is to ensure that you answer as many questions as possible through your blogs (which people are actively searching for). So don’t just write a blog off the top of your head or about something irrelevant that is not going to yield results, blogging for business results means that your blog has to bring visitors to your site and keep them there.
Aside from search engine optimisation and bringing people to your site blogging has another very important role which is showing you as an expert and or leader within your industry. Blogging when done well allows you the opportunity to become an authority within your sector. If you ran a business selling gym equipment then a weekly blog informing readers about the latest exercises, scientific research and sports supplements would over time start to get good traffic. By default this type of blog would probably get your sites keywords in there anyway and internal links can also be created but this type of blog is different to the type of blog created to be found on search engines. Have a good think about your business sector and think about what you could write weekly/fortnightly/monthly that would show you as the ‘go to person’ for the latest news and information. Obviously writing all of this from scratch would be incredibly time consuming so a good idea can be to go around other sites, gain snippets of information about what has been happening in your industry and then creating a ‘round up’ of the news on your site.
Again as with blogging for SEO, blogging to become an industry expert will certainly not happen overnight, for quite a while your blogs might only get a handful of viewers which is what stops most people from carrying on. If you persevere and write good content then you will be rewarded.
Guest post blogging is something that most people haven’t heard of but can be an incredibly powerful took for increasing the awareness of you/your business as well as potentially huge gains for SEO results. The first step is to find a high quality website that is ideally within your industry (although for some of the really big sites this isn’t as important as they might have content on a wide range of subjects) and make contact with them saying that you would like to write fresh content for their site and get a link back to your website within it. Duplicate content is again not allowed, the website owners will want fresh content so you cannot just send over a blog that is already on your website. Should you get away with it and have this published on a high quality site (you probably wouldn’t get this far) the search engines algorithms will identify it and penalise you so make sure that if you’re going to do guest post blogging that you do it properly.
If you’re new to blogging then it is worth spending the first few months building up a stock of blogs on your own website before you look at guest post blogging.
A lot of people don’t see the potential benefits of guest post blogging and don’t like the idea of writing unique content to be used on a site that isn’t their own but it really can pay dividends if you partner with the right site. Not only does it increase the exposure of you/your business as a blogger to people that may have never known that you existed before it shows the major search engines that your website is a reputable site. Getting a link back to your website from a high quality website informs the search engines that this fantastic websites approves of your website enough to place in on their own.
Video blogs are starting to gain momentum thanks to platforms such as YouTube. There’s an argument for and against video blogging so it’s a good idea if you’re comfortable with it to do it as well as the traditional written blog.
A video blog can be fantastic for business as potential customers actually get to see you as an individual, which studies have shown can have a massive impact on converting visitors into customers. The use of a video blog can also make your website more engaging keeping visitors on it for longer.
I have worked with a number of clients on video blogging and have found that it can have remarkable results in its own rights for SEO. By this I mean that the video can be found on search engines HIGHER than their website. A company I worked with recently had worked extremely hard to beat their competitors and gain prominence on page #1 in results for an extremely competitive sports supplement product and could get no higher than the top of page #2. As a different angle they took a handheld camcorder (a smartphone is just as good these days) and filmed a 2 minute video in which they held the supplement, spoke about its benefits and read out loud the ingredients. It certainly won’t be winning any video awards any time soon but what it did achieve was prominence on page #1 of major search engines and within the top one third of the page!
This was done by giving the video a title that included the name of the product and a very well detailed description of the video that included relevant keywords. The pessimists amongst you might be struggling to see the business benefits of this so let me tell you, at the end of the video we placed a clickable link saying ‘Get Yours Now’ which took viewers who clicked it to the relevant page to purchase the product. The result was a huge surge in traffic and a significant increase in sales.
If you’re in a service business then this can still work very well, you just need to think creatively. As with traditional blogging find out what people are searching for in your industry and then create a video which answers this question, at the end of the video place a clickable link to your website with a good ‘call to action’ whether that be finding out more information, getting to see the second half of the video or to make a purchase.
The negative side of video blogging is of course that you lose out on growing the amount of written content and keywords on your website. As you can see, there are significant benefits to video blogging so I would suggest putting some time to one side to do both. This annoys a lot of people when I tell them to make time for it but think about this, how many types of advertising or marketing can you spend half an hour on that will advertise your business for FREE indefinitely? If you run an email campaign, an advert in a magazine or something like this then it can of course work but only for as long as the campaign. When you create a video promoting your business and publish it on a platform such as YouTube or Vimeo it can be viewed 24/7 365 days a year by people around the globe at no cost to you. Have you still not got half an hour spare?
Your blog has been carefully thought out, well written and published, now it’s time to play the waiting game. For those of you who are impatient and want to see more immediate results I’m going to look at ways to give your blog exposure whilst you’re waiting for the search engines to index it.
The most obvious platform to push your blog is through social media; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn being the best for this. This can be done as soon as your blog is available to be read. My advice is to create a ‘teaser’ update that makes people want to click the link to find out more and read your blog. For example if you posted “Just published our latest blog about wardrobes…..LINK” you probably wouldn’t get many people clicking as it doesn’t sound intriguing, exciting or even interesting. If you created updates such as:
- Find out what you never knew about wardrobes…….LINK
- Our latest blog update has been released in the last 3 minutes be the first to read it…LINK
It can be difficult to make some topics exciting or intriguing but if you want people to read the blog you need to create the interest through your update.
An excellent way to gain massive exposure and to attempt a close to ‘viral’ update is to run a competition. I always like to operate ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ competitions, I post an update and tell my followers that if it gets, 10, 20, 50 shares/retweets combined then one person who has given it a share/retweet will receive a prize. The prize can be just about anything, something silly, funny, a discount code or a genuine prize. This type of competition and call to action can significantly increase the exposure of your blog and your business.
You will almost certainly have an email list of potential and past customers (and if you haven’t make sure you read the email marketing chapter and get to work on it), once a good blog has been published, send them an email letting them know about it. You can also ask them to ‘like’, ‘favourite’, ‘share’ or ‘retweet’ it to their followers if they enjoy it/find it useful. You will usually get a better response and more interaction from past customers and those who have signed up to your email newsletter compared to those on social media who may have never interacted with your business before.
The next way to promote your blog is an old fashioned offline method that is often forgotten about but really effective; tell people about it! Friends, family, colleagues, people at networking events…anyone that might be interested. Ask them to read it, tell their friends about it and share it online.
Moving onto one of the final areas regarding blogging for business; don’t lose track of why you’re blogging, ultimately it is to get more customers. Make sure that when visitors are reading your blog that you’re doing as much as possible to create and ensure a continuing relationship. Too many business owners just have a page of content on their blog, so visitors will mostly read the information and then click away, this is really missing out on some big opportunities.
Have an email signup form on the blog page and give a really good call to action to make them sign up e.g. “Get our FREE report on…….”. A lot of businesses don’t do this and it’s a fundamental error of blogging, someone has come to your website as they’re interested in what you’re writing about so why wouldn’t you give them the opportunity to sign up to find out more? Of course only a small percentage of viewers will sign up regardless of how good your call to action is (although a bad or no call to action will result in a significant fall in sign ups) but over time you will build up a list of potential customers who you can tell about promotions, special offers, new products or even your latest blog. This is the next stage in building a relationship with a potential customer, the blog introduced them to you/your business and you will now keep in touch with the long term goal being to turn them into a client (more on this in the email marketing chapter).
If your blog is relating to a product or service that the reader can purchase from you through your website then create a clear call to action enticing them to make the purchase. Graphically designed banner ads can work very well on blog pages as they really stand out when put next to paragraphs of text. Do this intelligently, don’t just show them the product with a clickable link to buy it; create demand (read more about this under the Calls To Action chapter). The demand can be created with some sort of special offer or discount with a deadline whether that be time e.g. “offer ends midnight” or quantity based e.g. “the next 3 customers”. As with email sign ups the immediate conversion rate from blog reader to customer will be very low but you’re giving the minority who’re thinking about buy an easy option to complete the checkout process as quickly and simply as possible who may not purchase if the clearly obvious link with a call to action wasn’t there.
In summary, blogging is the long game. I’m confident that if you follow the steps above, research your sector and write engaging content or create interesting video blogs that your web traffic will consistently grow over time. Find ways to engage and keep in touch with your readers and over time convert as many as possible into customers. My main tip is not to give up with blogging, it can be a chore but if some of the biggest companies in the world have blogs on their websites then you should to!