Business blogs are becoming more and more essential for companies to develop an online presence and promote new products. More and more consumers are making their purchasing decisions online, and search engine optimization is key for sites to end up in searches.
Blogs happen to be an extremely effective way to boost search rankings. They’re also an effective way to give in-depth descriptions of new products and how they could be useful.
They’re only useful if people are actually reading them, though. There are a few key things that you must do to generate a buzz through your blog.
We’ll cover how to market your blog in this article, giving you the tools you need to start seeing results.
How to Market Your Blog
Marketing your blog can be a bit of a challenge if you haven’t made one before. The most important thing you can do is create a blog worth marketing. That starts with what you’re going to write about.
Keyword Research
It seems intuitive to write a blog with keywords that center around the topic you’re writing about. Actually, you should seek out the most relevant keywords and write the blog to suite them.
Using keyword research tools, identify the most-searched words in your niche. This will give you an idea of what people are searching and what kind of content they want to find. What’s the use of a blog with information that no one wants to read?
A lot of the research tools will show you the rankings of different keywords, how much local and regional competition exists for those keywords, and suggest alternatives that may rank better.
So, find relevant keywords, create content to match, and keep doing it.
Make Blogs Useful and Well Written
Your blogs should solve a user problem. Whether it’s an analysis of the upcoming fiscal year or instructions on how to design custom pins, you’re going to need to solve a user problem. If you’re a baseball lover, read more now to learn how to design your own pins.
This can be difficult, though, because not everyone is used to writing articles in such a way.
It’s important to start with a hook. Mention a relevant or surprising statistic about the topic that shows its importance. “Did you know that rotten eggs are the leading cause of death in the United States?!”
That statement is untrue, but if it were, it would certainly catch attention. Follow up with categorical information about the topic that’s written in a fun, engaging tone.
If you’re worried about the quality of your writing, there are a few tools you can use. First, copy and paste your writing into something like the Hemingway App, which shows you what grade level your writing would fall into. The app also shows you instances of passive voice, adverbs, difficult sentences, and more problems that people may have while reading.
Second, download some sort of SEO plugin for your word processor. There are tools that show you how well the content you have written will fall into the specifications of search engines.
Combining good writing with SEO assistance will give your blog posts a healthy boost.
Create a Lot of Content and Link Internally
The purpose of your blog should be twofold: to expand your presence online and direct users to pages that will lead to sales.
In order to expand your presence, you’ll need to create a wealth of content that is optimized for SEO with relevant keywords. Even if the content isn’t exactly related to the nature of your site, create it so that it will draw users to you.
You only need to post content that is slightly related to your product or service. The more content you have and the more recently it was posted, the better. You should also structure your content hierarchically.
By this, we mean that you should have peripheral content and pillar content. You can think of the peripheral content as the sort of leaves of your web-tree. These are the posts that don’t have as close of a connection to the content of your site.
At the same time, they’re out there with the intention of drawing users toward the posts that do relate to your content. Those posts are going to be the ones that generate sales– those are your pillar content.
These are ones that directly relate to a product or service that you offer and will have strong calls to action in the conclusion. A call to action is exactly what it sounds like; a message drawing users to click or follow your site to the pages that will allow them to make purchases.
Linking Internally
Internal linking is simply the process of adding links to your own site within your content. You don’t want to do this too much, as search engines may take note and penalize you. That being said, a few internal links for every 500 words or so won’t put you back at all.
You want to use your links sparingly as they are a turn off to search engines as well as users. A well-placed link, however, can be too tempting to refuse. So, when the time is right, place a link to one of your products or services.
Good SEO and Social Media
A good SEO platform is, essentially, a good marketing platform. Your exposure will rise quickly when search engines are doing most of the work for you.
In order to spread the word at first, though, you’ll need to promote your posts through your social media presence. Most prominent social media sites have pay-per-click (PPC) platforms that you can employ.
These are well-placed advertisements that only charge you when they’re clicked upon. Pretty nice, huh? They’re definitely worth learning more about.
Need Help Getting Started?
Learning how to market your blog can be a bit intimidating. It’s difficult to keep up with regular, search engine optimized posts, let alone promote your page and keep up with the work you already have.
You have the option of getting some help, and you can visit our site to learn how we can lighten your load.