How To Boost Your Business’s Blog Posts

Blogging for your business is crucial and you must ensure that you have space for it on your website, and that you dedicate time to it at least once a week and ideally twice or even three times. If you do not have the time, hire someone who does – who can ensure that new content is going up on your website regularly.

Once you have a blog schedule in place, you might think that you can relax a little; after all, your blogging content is dealt with and you can start bringing in new customers with it. Isn’t that correct? It is partly true, but there are plenty more things you will need to do to enhance those blog posts and boost your business through them. Read on to find out more.

Why Are Blogs Important?

Before we can look at how to boost your blog posts, it will be useful to look at why they are important and why you should have one. Perhaps you had not realized they were quite so useful, or maybe you just have not got around to including one on your site yet. Once you know why you need one, it will be easier to ensure that you spend time working on it.

The main reason is that it will help to drive traffic to your website. When you have a blog, you can use it to add to the SEO on your site, thus positioning yourself higher up in the SERPs (search engine results pages). The higher your link is, the more people are going to click on it.

Your blog will also help to turn the traffic to your site into leads or even sales. If you can make your blog stand out, make it interesting, informative, and above all useful, buyers are going to be much more confident to make a purchase from your website. Your blog will give them that confidence, because it shows them that you are an expert and definitely know what you are talking about.

Not only that, but because your blog will be informative and useful, and because it is going to answer questions that potential buyers might have, you will be more easily able to create a relationship with those people. There will be trust involved – again, this will help someone choose to buy from you.

Finally, when you have a blog, you are always going to have something to say on social media. You can link from your social media pages to your blog post, boosting traffic and showing a much wider audience what you have written about.

Now that you know why a blog is important, we can start thinking about how to booth the readership of that blog so that everything we have mentioned above can happen, and happen more quickly too.

Target The Right Audience

When you write your blog posts or when you have a third party write them, you must always do so with your target audience in mind. You will need to know their age, gender, background, social class, nationality, hobbies, and of course, why they might want to buy from you in the first place. Your blog is not going to be a popular one if you practice a ‘scattergun’ approach and try to capture as many people’s interest as possible. If you try this method, you will find that you miss more than you hit.

In order to truly write with the correct target audience in mind, the best thing you can do is to carry out thorough market research. Not only will this help you target your blog accurately, but it will also help you in your wider marketing campaigns; you need to know who is most likely to buy your products or service and why. Once you know this, marketing becomes a lot easier and your blog will become a lot more popular, because the people who will get the most out of it will find it useful and keep coming back for more.

Market research is a vital component of any kind of marketing. If you choose to do it yourself, you will need to know as much as possible about the right tools you can use to collect the data and analyze it so that you can make the most of the information you are receiving; click here to find out more about the tools and the methods used.

Long Tail Keywords

Keywords are one of the main components of SEO (search engine optimization). Keywords are used strategically in just the right amounts (too few and they will not be picked up by the search engines’ algorithms, too many and they will be seen as spam and not useful) in each blog post to ensure that those posts rank highly for whatever that keyword happens to be. In other words, you should think about what your target audience is going to be typing into their search engines and ensure you have blog posts with that same keyword included.

Yet keywords alone are not going to be enough. When people search for something, they are much more likely to use a complete phrase consisting of at least three or four keywords strung together; this is also known as a long tail keyword. Since this is what they are searching for, this is what should be included within your blog. In that way, you will be able to differentiate your blog from the many others that are using the same single keyword by matching with more of the ones that your target audience is searching for.

Be Consistent

When you post blogs on a regular basis, whether you choose to do it once a week, twice a week, or more (less is possible, although if you want to make the biggest impact it is not recommended), you will start to build an audience of readers who look forward to the next piece of insight or information you are going to post up. They will know that they need to come back to your site consistently to read more about whatever it is you want to tell them.

Once you start to build a loyal readership in this way, you must continue to post regularly. This means writing blogs even when you are tired, when you cannot think of anything to say, or when you are very busy doing other things. You might, in this case, choose to write all your blogs at the start of the month, for example, and schedule them to go live at regular intervals. Rather than having to make regular time to create your posts, instead you can get them written in one big block which many people find more conducive to creativity and productivity. This is an important measure to bear in mind because once you have people coming to your site to read your blog, you will frustrate them and disappoint them – and even lose sales – when the next blog is not uploaded at the right time, or at all.

However, it is not just your audience you will be helping when you post on a regular basis; the search engines also like consistent blogging and will reward you (if you can do this) with higher rankings. By blogging regularly, you are showing the search engines that your site is active and that goes a long way to getting good SEO results.

Variety Is Key

If you want to position yourself as an authority in your field and prove that you are an expert – a great strategy since people are going to want to buy from an expert; it will give them peace of mind that they are making the right choice and that, should something go wrong or they have a question, they will get the answers they are looking for – you will need to write about your own specialism. Being too general will not help you to cement your top position, and even if it is useful and informative, it will potentially confuse your target audience.

So, it is clear that sticking to one subject or one area is important. However, this also has its drawback since if you are too niche, your content will all begin to sound the same and your audience is going to lose interest. Plus, you will not be able to add the variety of keywords to the post that you will need to in order to garner more interest from new customers, and to continue to stay close to (or at) the top of the search engine results.

What is the answer then? The answer is to write about your own area of expertise from a variety of different angles. This way, you can continue to show that you know everything about your topic, but you can also include new information on your site. If you are having trouble thinking of new topics to write about on the same subject, look at other sites in your niche. What are they writing about? Although you should never copy other people’s blogs word for word, you can get some useful ideas about the kinds of things to include on your own.