When you start up your business from scratch, your main priority right there and then is possibly your website. Many businesses are online these days, and without a physical shopfront to utilise, you need a killer website to bring in the crowds. You may have taken the time to work on your business website, and ensure the e-commerce side of things is up to scratch. Promoting regularly on social media helps, but is there anything else you can do online to help boost your business presence. There is in fact one other thing you could consider, and that is a blog relevant to your business.
It might be a great way to inadvertently sell to customers and clients. Linking to products that are being discussed, and using the blog as a more information site as a opposed to an online shop. But do you know where to begin in order to make a business blog become a website and actually work hard for you and your business. This is where this article could help. Here are some of the steps to consider and the secrets to business blogging success.
What is you want to achieve from the business blog?
You may have gotten to the stage where you think a business blog could help your website be seen even more, or certainly help when it comes to sales of your products and services, but have you thought about what you want from your business blog? All entrepreneurs and business owners will have a different agenda when it comes to their blogs, so you need to decide in what avenue you will explore for your business. You may share some of the common goals which includes driving more traffic to your main website, where your e-commerce shop is there ready and waiting. Gaining customer trust and loyalty. Through the blog you could provide useful information, which could encourage repeat purchases. It could also help you build up a level of trust when it comes business and consumer relationships.
Consider hosting and a separate domain
Many main websites have a blog facility and page that you could add to, but this could be a big mistake, as a separate domain and host could help you drive more traffic to your website or ultimately give you another slice of the pie when it comes to being seen on search engine results. It is definitely worth thinking about having a separate domain. This could also help with search engine optimisation which we get to a little later in the article. Hosting could be done through the same company that supplies it for your main website, or you could easily use smaller hosting firms if you intend to manage the business blog yourself.
Create the blog design in line with your business brand
Once you have your ideas sorted for your business blog, now you need to think about the design side of things. It might be worth ensuring that you stick to your current brand so that the two websites look similar. Using the same colours and your business logo, for example. Depending on what software you are using to create the blog, WordPress seems to be the most popular, you can pick a theme and design layout fairly easily and a lot of the time these can be free for you to use. Images need to be of good quality, but not large enough files where it slows things down when it comes to page loading. It might also be worth thinking about having the latest blog article displayed first. A carousel of images showing your most popular posts, and categorising the content so that it can be easily found once people land on your blog page. You also need to ensure that the images son your blog are high resolution and are good quality. nOt only do people care about the content, which needs to be free from spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, they also take into account the visual side of things. What they see can sometimes stem their interest to read, rather than the other way around.
Make sure all content is optimised
Now comes the fun bit, the content creation. This is where you need to have fun with the content you are creating, ensuring that the articles are informative and meeting the brief in terms of what you set out to do and achieve. But you also need to ensure that it does its job in terms of directing traffic to your main website where ultimate the sales are going to be made. This is when search engine optimisation and the use of keywords can really help. Not everyone is an expert in this, so you could look online to see who could help, where places like Zima Media is an Affordable SEO Agency for you to consider. Doing this from the start will help you avoid a hefty backlog of implementing keywords in the future and optimising your site at a later date.
Create great content and have a schedule
Content is king, and for a blog, it is the main purpose. Taking the time to write informative articles, engage with your audience and also share tips and tricks will help build your readership up steadily. Not only is it the words, but also the images that attract attention from potential blog readers. It is also important to have some form of blog schedule. This helps readers to be aware of when there may be new material to read, and also helps you to stay accountable when it comes to sharing online.
Use social media to promote posts and increase engagement
Finally, make sure you then promote your blog through your social media channels. Customers could find this less of a sales pitch than linking directly to your site, and may find themselves on your main home page anyway, having initially clicked through a blog post. Share images, and even snippets of content to help encourage a reader to click through.
Let’s hope these tips help you to create a business blog.