How useful is a blog for business? Is it worth it at all? The opinions of entrepreneurs, in this case, are divided. Some believe that it is a waste of time and resources. Others believe that the benefits of this tool are tremendous.
It is fair to say that there is an absolute majority of those who speak “for”. The content marketing strategy cannot be considered fully thought out without creating a special blog, which not only attracts traffic to the company website but also actively works on its reputation.
Experienced Essays Advisor blog writers will give you some tips on how to start a blog for business.
Business benefits of blogging
The main goal of blogging is to make your company more recognizable. Let’s make a reservation right away: a blog for business does not directly lead to an increase in sales, because it is not a website page and not a landing page. But research shows that people who read the company’s blog on a regular basis are 5-7 times more likely to become its real customers compared to casual visitors to the company’s website.
That is, the blog makes the audience more loyal and pays for itself even if investments are needed in its maintenance. This is especially true for companies that sell expensive goods and services.
The second important reason to start your own blog is the opportunity to demonstrate your own expertise. This is especially true for those who offer themselves as a specialist (for example, stylists, designers), whose business revolves around selling their own knowledge and skills.
In this case, a personal business blog is aimed at showing the target audience its competence and thereby arousing in it the desire to apply for a service. In such a situation, it is important to post content relevant to the interests of your audience, as well as to take into account the level of its complexity and depth.
In addition, a blog is a good tool for getting traffic through search engines. Using search engines, people want to find information about a product or a way to buy it most profitably and easily. This is how they can reach the blog and then the store if there is one.
According to the experienced writers at Cheap Paper Writing service, by creating useful and marketing-wise competent content, you can increase audience loyalty to both your own product and company.
3 cases when a company badly needs a blog
Despite the great benefits of blogs, there are cases where blogging makes no sense because the costs are not justified, and the time is wasted. And vice versa – sometimes a blog becomes a very powerful tool for company promotion. Consider situations in which it is simply necessary.
- A company offers a complex product for which it is necessary to demonstrate its expert level. We are talking primarily about the b2b sphere, but this may also concern b2c. For example, advertising agencies. It is extremely important for them to show their competencies in order to attract partners.
- The company needs to work on the image. This is especially true for those who have just entered the market and want to form a positive attitude towards themselves. It is important for the company to be talked about, and the blog will cope well with this task.
- The need to create a community of customers loyal to the brand. Often this need is connected with the fact that the company works in several directions at once and needs some kind of defender who can assist in the fight against a possible negative reaction from customers.
7 stages of creating a business blog
In order for a blog to bring real benefits, you need to know the rules of its creation and maintenance. Let’s look at the 7 main stages of creating a blog for business.
#1. Define your goals
You need to understand that a blog is a long—term commitment. You will have to invest your own resources in it: money, time, and energy. At the same time, it will have to be conducted continuously, because, in modern realities, any simple one threatens complete oblivion: competition is too great. It makes sense to ask yourself:
- how can a blog be useful in your field;
- what do you want to get from him;
- what information can your audience get thanks to it.
A company may have different goals: creating and developing a new business or increasing sales and the number of customers. It is important to define the goal as clearly as possible and concretize it in the tasks, the content of the blog depends on them. Everything you are going to write or shoot a video about should correlate with your main plan.
#2. Choose the right platform
It is very important to choose the right platform for blogging. To do this, you need to understand where the target audience is concentrated and what content is most interesting to it.
#3. Study your audience
It is important to understand who your potential client is, what he is interested in, and what his needs are. Without knowledge of these basic things for any business, you will not be able to blog or develop your business.
In blogging, the most important thing is to give the audience the information that they are looking for or that arouses interest. At the same time, you need to understand that it is almost impossible to please absolutely everyone, so it is better to focus on a specific stratum of people.
However, the company can sell goods or services intended for a wide range of users. In this case, the presentation of information should be relatively simple and accessible to representatives of different social groups. If you are doing something highly specialized, try to post truly expert materials in your blog that professionals may be interested in.
#4. Choose a content strategy
A blog for business will be successful if you have a clear strategy for its development and a content plan. Imagine your client, think about who he is, what he does, what he would be interested in reading, and find out what problems are bothering him and whether you can be useful in solving them.
The next step is to create a list of words with which this person can search the Internet. These keywords should be used when writing a blog post. And what is important here is not the mechanical artificial inclusion of them in the text for SEO promotion. Your task is to create such content that the client will study with interest and pleasure, and then, perhaps, share it on their social networks.
It is important to determine the frequency of content placement. A lot depends on its essence, depth, and, of course, on the features of the platform on which the blog exists. Somewhere it is necessary to make posts every day, more than once. In another situation, one post per week is enough. Focus on the field in which you work in order to develop an adequate posting schedule.
A specially trained person or a group of qualified people can run a blog. This is true not only for companies with a whole staff of employees but also for personal blogs: often individual entrepreneurs promoting their services have assistants. It is quite normal to delegate some of the responsibilities to professionals. It is important to find people who understand the specifics of the blog and know what content will be relevant and interesting to the public. After all, your reputation, business, and money are at stake. So, for example, if your blog is about medicine, it makes sense to look for a narrowly focused nursing paper writer.
If you don’t provide information on time, the audience will quickly find a replacement for your blog, so you need to think about publications in advance so that you don’t rush around in despair in search of new ideas.
You can also come up with some kind of regular blog column (interview, review, description of something, etc.) or develop a grid of posts in which content on a specific topic will be published on specific days of the week or month.
#5. Decide on the topic
When searching for a topic for a business blog, try using the tips provided below.
Specifics
In this case, the topic of the blog and its content are directly related to the specifics of the business. For example, an advertising agency will write only about advertising and marketing.
A near-target approach
This approach suggests blogging on various topics that may be indirectly related to your business, and not just on narrow-profile ones. This is the most popular option. Let’s take the same example — an advertising agency. With this approach, you can write not only about marketing but also about business in general.
Anything
The topic of the blog in this case is very extensive, you can write about anything. The main thing is not to forget that the content should be interesting to people. For example, an advertiser and marketer can write about the economic situation in the country.
#6. Decide on the types of content
In this case, we do not mean the division of content into entertainment, informational, and selling. We are talking about its types, which should always be present in the blog, no matter what its main topic is.
Case article
Such material is usually based on real stories and customer experiences. Let’s say you can mention a problem that your client had to face, tell us what solutions you proposed and how it ended.
Customer reviews
A real person’s story about a company’s product can make any business blog more interesting. Reviews of different formats make it more lively.
Life hacks
People love life hacks that make it possible to simplify their lives or make the use of goods more interesting.
Answers to questions
Besides the fact that this is useful content for the audience, it is also a great way of SEO promotion. Use the question words “how much”, “how”, “why”, “why”, “what”, etc. in the title of the material, because they are most often entered into search engines by people.
Lists
Users like it when the content is presented in the form of a list since in this case, it is convenient to perceive and remember the information. Remember all those “10 ways how…” or “15 popular…”
Tips and recommendations
They are also popular among blog readers because they have a personal connotation and are positively perceived by people.
Statistical data
They are presented in the form of graphs and diagrams, which is quite interesting to study, especially for those who are really interested in the topic of the blog. This is how you can tell about the growth of your business or the number of satisfied customers.
Situational posts
In this case, an up-to-date information guide is taken and fed through the prism of your activity.
#7. Constantly promote your blog
Today, it’s not enough just to write interesting posts for the audience to find you. The competition is so great that it is necessary to use as many ways as possible to promote yourself.
Here are some of the most popular ways to increase the popularity of a blog:
- use all the features of social networks;
- create presentations of publications;
- attach a blog link to your signature in email messages;
- use keywords;
- use popular hashtags corresponding to the topic of the post and blog;
- start headlines with numbers (the audience likes it);
- make links to earlier publications in posts.
When a blog is ready and running, you need to constantly evaluate the results of your work. It is important to track who makes up his audience, how these people get into the blog, and whether they like the content. Numerous analytics services can help collect this information. Knowing all the data, you can work to promote your blog and business in general in the right direction, and if necessary, change course.
