Starting a blog for your business is one of the best additions you can make to your website.
This is because it helps you achieve a lot of different goals at the same time, while costing you relatively little compared to an advertising campaign. For example, a business blog can help you to draw visitors to your website, display social proof of your expertise and build your brand image, simultaneously.
Of course, the most important reason why you’d start a business blog is to draw attention to your website. A blog can help you do this if you use proven content marketing strategies, such as researching and including keywords relating to your chosen topic, targeting particular customers by posting often about popular topics, as well as advertising your products and services by including links to them in your articles.
Furthermore, a blog can help you to demonstrate your expertise within your industry, if you post genuinely helpful information that readers can implement into their daily lives. When you help someone with a problem, they will be more likely to trust your abilities to deliver strong products and services.
In addition, they may feel grateful to you for your assistance, and give you their business as a reward. As a result, you can use both social proof and the power of reciprocity to attract new customers via your blog.
This will boost your brand image in the process, and set you apart from your competitors as a leader within your industry.
However, starting a blog is not the work of a moment, and nor is ensuring that it is successful. It takes time, dedication and the implementation of proven content writing techniques.
Here is a guide for starting a new business blog:
You will need to ensure that your website is safe and secure
First off, before you start your blog, you will need to ensure that your website is as safe and secure as it can be. After all, if your blog eventually becomes as successful as you want it to be, your website will experience a lot of traffic. Not only will you want to ensure the site isn’t hacked (thus causing disruption to your blog and potential reputational damage), but also to protect you from the increase of data thieves and scammers who will target you if your website is more prominent.
This is why you need to take steps to protect your coding and data, by using a data loss prevention platform. This will help safeguard your sensitive data and give you the peace of mind that your blog will not attract unwanted attention from cyber criminals.
Find a theme that suits your brand
The most important decision you need to make when you first create your business blog is its central theme. This may be easy if you are in a particular niche and you want to keep content related to your niche. However, if you later want to have contributors from other areas of business posting on your blog or to attract readers from different walks of life, you may want to make your theme broader.
For example, if you sell software, but you want to attract readers who are searching for broader terms like “business management” or “entrepreneurship”, then writing about a wider range of topics relating to business is a good idea.
This is especially true if you’re looking to attract certain customers to your business. If your target customer demographic is CEOs, then you could tailor content around subjects they would be interested in.
Content marketing, one of the most powerful marketing techniques
Blogging has become one of the most powerful ways of marketing your brand over the past two decades. This is because it relates to content marketing, which is essentially when you advertise your business within a piece of content. It is powerful because it actively benefits the consumer, rather than advertising to them outright. It also demonstrates your brand’s expertise and raises its profile within your industry.
Therefore, it is best to make the most of this power through your blog. Incorporate SEO by researching commonly searched terms by your target audience, then base articles around them. Within these articles you can link to certain products or services you offer, thereby advertising to consumers in a subtle way.
Update your blog regularly
An important point to remember with blogging is that you need to post regularly. The benefits of content marketing and increased website traffic only happens when you consistently post engaging and useful information, rather than waiting long periods of time between articles and then spamming search engines with lots of posts.
Bear this in mind, especially if you are busy with your company, and consider hiring a full-time content writer to do the writing for you.
