17 Tips to Successfuly Use a Blog to Promote Your Business
Propelrr
April 30, 2021
Without a doubt, you want your business to thrive, reach and win the hearts of your target audience, at the same time be on top of your industry. To achieve this, one of the most cost-effective ways you can do is to write a blog for your business. As a matter of fact, blogging can broaden your market reach and help you establish the authority of your brand in your industry.
There’s a simple criteria to consider when figuring out how to write a blog to promote your business. They have to satisfy the needs and wants of two entities: your readers and the bots. In short, your blogs should appeal to your readers, align with the search intent, and be crawlable and indexable to bots.
To do this, you have to have a systematic strategy. Don’t fret, help is here. You can enlist the help of an expert digital marketing agency to provide you with strategic content marketing services.
Tips to write effective blogs for promoting your business
- Set your blog’s objectives
- Set a benchmark of what you want to achieve for your business blog
- Know your audience and write for them
- Categorize your content
- Create a content calendar
- Do a keyword research
- Ideate your content
- Write valuable and informative content
- Create appealing visuals to accompany your content
- Cite informative links
- Promote your blog via link building
- Promote your blog on social media
- Submit your blogs to forums
- Check and monitor your blog’s performance
- Repurpose your content
- Refresh your blogs to make sure they are always relevant
- Link out to it when you create new content
Continue reading this article to understand what you should do per item.
1. Set your blog’s objectives
Objectives help you navigate in which direction you want your blog post to go. Aside from promoting your business, you can set other goals for your blogs that will have a direct impact on your business.
Some of these additional objectives you can set are:
- Engage with your audience
- Improve search engine visibility
- Be covered by the media and other bloggers
- Establish connections with other businesses
- Provide an informative communication channel
Setting specific goals will help you plan your content creation process. This includes what to write, how to write, when to write, for whom to write, and why you should write.
2. Set a benchmark of what you want to achieve for your business blog
Once you have set your goals, you have to set a benchmark for your business blog. Set an ideal estimation performance of your blog and compare it against the average six months performance of your business blogs. Some criteria you can include are:
- Pageviews
- Time on site
- CTA clicks
- Engagement
- Brand recognition
- Search engine rankings
- Traffic to the blog
- Traffic to the website
- Sales leads
- Sold products
- Customer satisfaction
- Industry recognition
- Revenue of ads on the blog
Say you are a small business. When setting up a benchmark for your small business blog, you can always start with small goals so you can focus on the small wins of your small business blogs. After some time, increase the benchmark you set for your blogs and adjust your strategies to make sure you can reach or even surpass your goals and your competitors.
Tools are helpful when measuring the success of your strategies. Some of the tools you can utilize in measuring the effectiveness of your blogs are:
- Web analytics
- Social media monitoring tools
- Link analysis tools
- Comment tracking tools
3. Know your audience and write for them
One of the most valuable tips in writing a business blog is learning how to write for your audience, not for yourself. Familiarize yourself with your audience and know which topics appeal to them.
To get to know your audience, it is best to craft your ideal persona or research about them. Based on the products and services that you offer, think of someone who’s more likely to need your business. Simply put, personas represent your ideal target market based on research and data gathered.
Let’s look at an example from tour operator software Tourwriter and their blog, below. Can you guess who they’re trying to talk to in their blogs and other content on the website? Off-the-bat, you can tell that they want to talk to tour operators, and the communication – from the tone to the messaging – is consistently observed in all their pages.
Figure 3.1. Tourwriter’s Blog Page. As you can see from the titles of their blog posts, it’s well-targeted to their market of tour operators which they would like to offer their solutions for. Photo courtesy of Tourwriter.
Get to know what your audience wants through various means, especially including data analytics in the mix. This process involves diving deeper into the data of your consumers to understand their behavior and come up with strategies that will make them want to avail of your products and services.
One other tool you can use is Google Analytics. This tool can help you see the demographics of your audience, including their age range, gender, and interests. You can also use other tools to determine what device your target audience use. Are they new or regular visitors? How did they find your website? What keywords do they use?
To win the attention of your persona, be sure to tailor-fit your blog posts for them. Write blogs that will help them and write in a way that appeals to them. For example, if your target audience is students, a very formal language and heavy jargoned blog post won’t probably interest them that much.
If you have good traffic on your website and would like to know what type of blogs to include to promote your business, it is best to conduct a short survey or ask them for feedback regarding what else you can do for them. Once you’ve received their feedback, process the findings first and then apply these to your blog strategies.
4. Categorize your content
Categorizing your content will make your business’ blog page more organized and easier to navigate. It will help your audience find the information they want and need in a short period of time. To do this, you can assign specific categories to each post. For better user experience, you can also use tags on the bottom part of your blogs to determine which category they fall under.
Blog categories also help your audience and bots understand what type of business you are and what products and services you offer. If you have a broad content category, you can further simplify it by adding subcategories.
5. Create a content calendar
Content is king when it comes to online marketing and blogging, but consistency is key as well to make your business blog successful. With the help of a content calendar, you can plan what content to produce, when to post it, how often you should post, and which blogs need updating.
To make sure that you are on time with the blogs you need to produce to maintain your online presence and engagement, it is best to plan your calendar months or even a year in advance. Using a calendar also prevents you from on-the-fly promotion or distribution of content.
6. Do a keyword research
Knowing who your audience is and what they want isn’t enough in crafting the perfect content. Before you start ideating content topics, it is best to research keywords first.
Keywords are what your users type in search engines when looking for something online. When searching for keywords, you can focus on long-tail keywords which are more specific and are more likely to be used by your target audience to arrive at the specific content they’re looking for.
Here’s a simple example of a short-tail keyword versus a long-tail keyword:
- Short-tail keyword: Business blogs
- Long-tail keyword: How to write a business blog
As seen in the example above, short-tail keywords are more general while long-tail keywords are more specific. Because they are more specific, they may have less traffic BUT, usually, using this type of keyword in your business blog results in a higher conversion value because they have less competition.
To help you with your keyword research, here are some tools you can use:
- Soolve
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
- Google Keyword Planner
- KewordTool.io
- Moz Keyword Explorer
7. Ideate your content
Equipped with the right keywords, now’s the time to think about the content for your business blog.
When thinking about topics, you can start with the basics. For example, create content on FAQs your audience always inquire about. This may also include how-tos and other tutorials. Tools are a big help when generating new ideas for your content so make sure to use them as well.
To make sure that your content is relevant, you can include the data from the feedback you received from your audience.
You can also come up with varied, interesting, and relevant topics for maximum reach through trend-jacking. This is the process of optimizing your blog based on trending topics or trending hashtags online. For example, Black Lives Matter.
When ideating content for blogs for your business, it also helps to look at the calendar. Are there incoming holidays or important events for the month? For example, in May, Mothers’ Day is celebrated. Perhaps, you can write about that and connect it with your business. Remember that when writing blogs for specific holidays, they should be aligned with your goals and your business. Always look into your calendar to make sure that you have timely and seasonal content on your website.
8. Write valuable and informative content
When you ask content marketing experts for advice about how to write a blog to promote your business, they would say that producing evergreen content is a best practice. Evergreen content is content that won’t need regular updating because it is always relevant.
Examples of evergreen content are:
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- How-tos
- Timelines
- Tutorials
- Glossaries of term and phrases
Another tip you can apply when ideating content is to fill in the content gap or write about what has not been covered yet. Determining the gap may take some extra effort but it is sure worth it. One strategy you can do when determining the gap is to conduct research, analyze your competitors, look for loopholes you can fill in, and put yourself in the perspective of your audience. Because research takes time, money, and effort, you can try the Heuristic Evaluation approach. This process looks at how you and your competitors analyze your brand’s product messaging.
9. Create appealing visuals to accompany your content
Words can be a bit overwhelming or daunting. To make your audience more engaged with your business blog, select visuals to accompany your words. The more engaged your audience is, the more time they spend on your page. Visuals make the information you present easier to digest and more fun to consume.
Visuals you may include in your content are:
- Photos
- Videos
- Quotes
- Data table
- Infographics
- Gifographics (or animated infographics)
- GIFs
- Memes
- Screenshots
10. Cite informative links
When writing a post, it is best to cite informative links. That way, the website you cited may mention your post to their readers, therefore opening the way for their audience to visit your blog as well, making your reach wider.
Make sure that when you cite informative links, you cite websites that have high domain authority to improve your ranking and credibility. One tool you can use when determining the authority of the website you are linking to is Moz.com’s Domain SEO Analysis Tool.
11. Promote your blog via link building
Link building is the process of having other websites link back to your website. Promoting your blogs via link building is a good strategy for Google bots to determine that your site is a quality resource worth to be cited.
Earning backlinks from authoritative websites through organic link building may be a tedious process, but it is worth it. Here are some strategies you can do so that external sites will link to your website:
- Create unique, high-quality, and useful content. Once people see that your blog is worthy to share, they will be compelled to share it with others or link to it when creating their content.
- Look for and create relationships with popular bloggers and influencers in your niche. Ask them to review or mention your product and services to their blogs, vlogs, and social media.
- Ask your friends and business partners to link back to your website. Pro tip: Make sure that the websites that will link to your website are in the same or related industry to gain more relevance and ranking.
To simplify the importance of backlinks to your business blog, imagine this: You create a Facebook post, you tagged a friend to that post, and that tagged post is now viewable by your friend’s friends, therefore earning more views and probably reactions to your post.
12. Promote your blog on social media
Speaking of Facebook, almost everyone is on social media right now, especially since the pandemic started in 2020. So what better way to make your blog post more accessible than promoting it on your company’s social media? Posting timely articles and posts in your business’ social media accounts is also an effective social media strategy to make your business well-known in a larger market.
When sharing your blog on social media, craft an eye-catching post and link your blog to the post. Because social media platforms are often different from one another, it is best to fit your post based on the specialization of the platform you are using. When crafting your post, make sure that you use keywords that suit your blog best.
13. Submit your blogs to forums
When searching for forums, make sure that they are relevant to your niche. That way, you get to connect with people who are interested or are experts in your niche. Try to answer their queries that are based on your expertise. At the end of your answer, link your blog post related to their query.
Being part of a forum and providing solutions to the visitors’ problems is a good way not only to build traffic to your website but also to prove that you are an expert, therefore building up your credibility and ranking.
14. Check and monitor your blog’s performance
Regularly checking the performance of your blogs will help you determine if your strategies are working well or not. It also helps you discover new ways to create content to promote your business to your target audience.
Some metrics you need to track to gauge your blog’s performance are:
- Traffic
- Generated leads
- Subscribers
- Shares
- Backlinks
- Comments
15. Repurpose your content
Recycling your content and transforming them into new formats increases its reach. Depending on your goal, you can get a piece of information from your old blog and create a new content format for it that can be shared on different platforms.
For example, you can create a video out of a travel blog you created and post it on YouTube. That way, people who often use YouTube or prefer to learn things through videos will have the chance to know your content, your website, and of course, your brand.
Other formats you can try also include infographics and slide presentations which can be used for events such as online webinars.
16. Refresh your blogs to make sure they are always relevant
In using a blog to promote your business, creating a new blog post is not the only thing you need to do. You should also make sure that your old blogs are still timely and relevant.
Doing so will take you less time, energy, and money in producing new relevant content. When selecting which blogs to refresh, check the performance of each blog and update the most successful ones. By successful, we mean blogs that have high traffic, high engagement, and high lead generation.
When updating a new blog post, you should not only update the information. You can also update the visuals you used, especially if these are screenshots. You can also use new keywords that apply to the present search intent of your audience.
17. Link out to it when you create new content
Aside from backlinks, adding internal links in your blogs is helpful and an essential aspect you shouldn’t miss in your on-page SEO checklist. When you link internally, it is easier for your readers to see other blogs you’ve created that are related to the blog they are currently reading, therefore increasing their engagement to your site. This results in a longer visit to your site.
When internal linking, make sure that you link to related pages to your website and use appealing and applicable anchor text.
Key Takeaways
Writing blogs to promote your business may be a long-game strategy, but its rewards are tremendous and consistent. Keep in mind the following as you seek to promote your business online through blogging:
- Write blogs that are centered around your audience. When learning how to blog for business, it is not enough that you know how to write. It is best to research topics and keywords that your target audience is likely to search.
- Recycling your blog into a new format is an excellent way to extend the reach of your website. You can turn written words into videos, photos, infographics, slide presentations, and other formats possible.
- Make sure that your content is always fresh, easy to digest, and useful. Internal links to your other blogs will increase user experience and lengthens the time your audience spends on your website.
These are just 17 of the many ways you can take on how to blog for your business. Are there other strategies you have found helpful in using business blogs? Or are there strategies mentioned here you would like to apply to your website? If so, comment below. We would love to have a conversation with you.