Why oh why do I have to blog? Well, you don’t. But it will help your business and web site traffic grow if you do it right. But let’s get one thing clear up front. Blogging is a commitment.
Unlike your web site overall, where you could set it up and then allow it to remain relatively untouched, a blog is the portion of your web site you are making a commitment to interact with on a regular basis.
Blogging helps you with your search engine optimization, as you are showing search engines your site is regularly updated with content that’s (hopefully!) relevant to searches related to your business.
Here are five tips to help you be more successful in your blogging efforts:
1. Communicate with your audience. Sounds simple enough, but you want to know who is most likely to buy your products or services. This is your “target audience” in marketing terms. It’s important to know who is most likely to buy so you can think about what these people are likely to be searching for – what news or information would they find compelling? Think about what’s in it for them – what are common questions you encounter in your business? Pose those questions in the manner people usually ask you and then answer them in a blog post. You can even set up multiple blogs by answering one question per blog – that’s a great way to spread out the blog posts!
2. Focus your Communication. This time we’re not talking about who your communicating to, but rather what you’re communicating. Before you start blogging, think about what you want to accomplish with your blogs, the content that will help achieve this goal, and again about what questions people ask you in your business. Help consumers answer commonly asked questions so they can find you as the local source for relevant information for your business. Remember quality information is important, as this is your reputation we’re building! Watch for typos and proofread all blogs!
3. Commit to the Frequency. It’s important to do a blog more than once in a blue moon. Search engines want to see regularly updated content, and users want to be able to find what they are looking for easily. A daily blog would be a significant commitment, and likely more than necessary. Doing a blog weekly or even monthly might be more appropriate in your business. We recommend doing three to four blogs in advance so you’re always ahead. We recommend scheduling them out to run once a week or once every two weeks, instead of publishing them all at once. Commit to a regular pattern or schedule to help keep up your blogging commitment. Once you stop blogging, it may be harder to start back up again!
4. Keywords! You’re blogging to help your target audience find you for a specific goal – make sure you’re using the words people search for when they’re asking questions or seeking out your business products or services. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to search for the words you think people look for in regards to your product or service. Google’s tool will show you what words people really search for, and what they search for locally versus globally. Google will also tell you the level of competition for advertising for the keywords. If you can find words people search for often that do not have a high level of competition, those are words that are most idea for including in your blog posts. For example, if you entered in the words “how to write a blog” or “blogs,” you will see that Google also suggests “Why blog,” “the blog,” “how do I blog,” “how do you blog, “what is blog,” what are blogs,” etc. You can also see that the competition for these phrases are low. If you look at the name of this post, we used this insight to name the post to make it more relevant for search engines matching up results to searches for “blogs” or “why blog” etc. It wouldn’t make sense for a search engine if we said Blogging is Tops or something similar – search engines don’t get puns. Be simple and straight forward.
5. Engage! Once you’ve gone through all this work, it’s important to engage with your readers. Post the blog on your Facebook page, Twitter feed, and be sure to watch for comments and feedback. Offer ideas and insights to readers, and use their ideas for future blogs!
Have fun, and enjoy the process. If you don’t feel like blogging, it will come across in your posts – so wait until you’re ready … jot down ideas as they come to you so when you do have time you have a list or two of ideas.
Happy blogging!
