I began my online journey with an HTML website. I was simply sitting on my desk after a siesta when a friend brought up the idea of beginning business blogging.
He told me, “Hey, William. I will code a great website for you. It will be a cornerstone for all your marketing efforts.”
I guess you understand how it’s a daunting task blogging on an HTML site. Though the website was light and visually appealing, it was a tussle updating content daily.
When I switched to WordPress, blogging became a walk in the park.
That’s what most B2B marketers are doing now. Business blogging places them ahead of their peers. They get a 67% lead increase over other marketers who don’t blog.
A blog literally sells your services on autopilot once your content begins to rank on search engines.
It’s disappointing, however, to note that some businesses are not leveraging the power of business blogging to achieve their marketing goals.
You see, blogging builds trust with your audience. If you update your blog regularly, it shows that you care for your customers and their businesses.
In generating traffic, about 65% of daily internet browsers visit blogs. Therefore, a blog has a good chance of attracting those prospects to your website, hop into your list, and ultimately purchase your offers.
What’s business blogging?
Let’s begin this from the basics of blogging. I have noted that some people fail to differentiate between a website and a blog.
What you need to know is that a website is static and hard to update regularly. A blog is a section within a site where you can share your thoughts with the world regularly [put a screenshot of a dentist blog].
It’s one of the organization’s digital marketing channels. A blog post is a short piece of content on a blog that talks about a specific topic.
Blogging is an art of publishing and updating new blog posts on your blog.
What about business blogging?
Well, it’s an inbound content marketing tactic, which a business can undertake to drive traffic, generate leads, and increase their brand recognition.
Some people blog for fun, but in one way or the other, you will need to make money from your hobby. You will then need to treat your blog as an essential marketing element.
No business blog? Here is why you need it today:
Having a business blog is not a nerve-wracking task. If you are using WordPress, it’s only a few clicks away.
1. Brings in organic traffic from search engines
It’s hard to rank a website without blog content. Unless there is no other similar content on the internet.
However, with the current digital era, where there are about 1.6 billion live websites, it worth having a blog and tapping into a share of the organic juice.
Your customers are regularly searching for answers to their challenges. As they consult Google and other search engines, let them find your blog in the search results.
Once they land on your site, let them find immense value from your targeted blog content. They will then opt into your email list and become your regular buyers.
Therefore, a properly optimized blog will reduce your marketing cost and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
You will have to undertake intensive search engine optimization (SEO) to attract many qualified leads since not all web visitors convert into customers.
2. Helps to build business authority
A blog with rich and educative content achieves business authority fast. For example, HubSpot, over the years, has grown to be a go-to blog to learn inbound content marketing practices. Backlinko is also authoritative when it comes to learning SEO and link building.
Achieving backlinks, comments, and lots of social engagement on your blog is not a walk in the park. Your blog has to be exceptional.
When your blog is up there, you will enjoy privileges that a few businesses enjoy, such as increased organic traffic, which increases leads and sales.
Blogging is fun if you like solving challenges your audience faces. Go all-in with a mindset of helping solve problems and notice how traffic increases automatically.
Otherwise, you will barely move the needle if you focus on boosting traffic and not conversion.
Do you think HubSpot or Backlinko focusses on traffic? No. their target is achieving business authority.
To get to that level, they had to create unique and resourceful content. With authority comes leads and business growth.
3. Builds and maintain a strong relationship with your audience
Without a good relationship with your audience, you will not achieve conversions and hence no business growth.
How does a blog help you to do that?
Well, with relevant content on your blog, customers will learn to trust you since you are helping them, as well. They will comment on your blog posts, like, and share them with their friends.
In the process, they will develop trust and a stronger relationship with you. Customers only buy from people they trust.
Most businesses make these mistakes when it comes to blogging
Are you getting the benefits above from your blog? If not, likely, you are not keen on some blogging rules. Here is where most businesses go wrong when it comes to business blogging:
They focus on the “we” instead of the “you.”
The primary blogging focus is your customer. Therefore, you should direct all your blogging efforts to attract, engage, and delight them.
I have visited some sites that talk about themselves a lot. Most of these sites want to position themselves as experts in the eyes of the customer, but they are doing it wrong.
You see, the customer does not care about you. He has his share of challenges. What he needs is someone who can tell him, “this is how to make money from your blog,” or “this is how to make your day productive.”
Hence, a good business blog content taps into the emotions of the readers, engage them and provide a solution. Emotional marketing is the most potent form of marketing because it brings forth more reliable connections.
They don’t collect data first
Without data, you will not know how to make profitable business decisions. Supposed you want to do something, for example, beginning a luxurious car hire business, can you do it without collecting data first?
Of course, you can’t; that’s jumping the gun.
However, with enough business data, you can make better fact-based decisions and scale fast. Most top companies, such as Facebook and Google, spend billions collecting and analyzing data.
Therefore, data is crucial when you want to begin a profitable business blogging. But how do you collect data?
The kind of data to collect should be related to the solutions you want to bring to the blogosphere. Hence, you need to know how many customers are searching for the answers you have in mind.
Since your prospects use search terms when looking for solutions on search engines, look up for those keywords. Target profitable keywords with low to medium competition.
They are not consistent
Once you have data, the next step is to create unique and relevant content. You need to be consistent, though, to achieve significant results.
You can’t build an authoritative business blog if you update your blog posts once per month. It should be a regular activity because Google loves fresh content.
Research shows that companies that publish at least 16 blog posts or more per month get 3.5 times more organic traffic than businesses that publish less than 5 blog posts per month.
Therefore, consistency is critical in blogging. But how do you maintain consistency? Well, you need a content strategy. It will give you a framework of what to do and keeps you on track.
Here is how to blog effectively
Since you now understand the benefits of business blogging, you need to know how to plan, launch, and grow a profitable blog that knocks it out of the park.
Here is how:
1. Undertake content mapping
I know you have heard this term several times. But what’s content mapping?
Any inbound content marketing strategy requires a plan, a roadmap that shows you where you are going.
Since the whole intent of developing a content marketing plan is to attract the customer into your sales funnel process, you need then to understand your customer journey.
You can understand the customer journey quite easily by creating a buyer persona, which is a representation of your ideal customer and their journey when they are exposed to your business operational environment.
The customer journey has several stages, such as the awareness stage, the consideration stage, the decision, and the delighting stage. You need to map all this in your content map.
Inbound content marketing is customer-centric. You will need to place your customer’s needs at the center of all your marketing efforts.
Hence, content mapping is the first step toward an active business blogging journey.
2. Have a blogging strategy
Any successful process needs a strategy. Since you already have a content map, the next step is to document your blogging strategy.
You will tarmac along the way if you don’t have a strategy in place. That’s not the right jump off the cliff. I know how daunting it is to start without one.
You see, a strategy helps to make you consistent. It shows you the following:
- Which topics to handle
- Who will handle which topic
- The keywords to target
- The date to publish and promote
With all these in place, you can achieve your blogging goals faster than jumping the gun. It’s not a nerve-wracking task to come up with one. Check this one out below. I’m using the one currently.
As you can see, it has the essential elements for developing and promoting valuable and relevant content to my mapped audience.
3. Create and promote content
With a strategy in place, you need to execute it.
Have a content creation team in place if you can’t create all the blog content yourself.
Set aside about $1,000 for content creation since you will need a team of content writers to develop content regularly.
Your blog posts need to be search engines optimized, employ conversational content marketing, and adequately structured for easy readability.
Use images in your posts because search engines favor blog posts with images. In fact, images attract 90% more views.
Plus, it also adds to the beauty of your post. Hence, it’s easy for your readers to understand. Ensure you optimize your images for search engines as well.
Promote your blog via social channels, YouTube, and bookmarking sites. The best social media channel to leverage is LinkedIn because it’s primarily for professionals. Therefore, it’s recommended for B2B blog content.
4. Leverage on analytics
There is no defined formula to rank your blog content because the algorithm is continually changing. No matter what SEO gurus tell, no one has gotten it all right.
However, if you keep checking the performance of your blog posts via Google Analytics, you will understand what’s working and what’s not.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool if you want to optimize your blog content for better performance.
You can know if your content is valuable to your audience with the bounce rate. If it’s high, you need to offer more value. A low bounce rate signifies that most readers stay for a significant amount of time on your site.
You will also know the amount of organic traffic you are getting plus one from social media. Organic traffic is always better because it converts easily. It also shows that your content is performing well.
Therefore, you need a Google Analytics account for effective and profitable blogging.
Conclusion
Business blogging is an effective inbound content marketing practice. It builds and strengthens customer relationships, enables a business to achieve business authority fast, boosts leads, sales, and ultimately leads to business growth.
Nevertheless, how do you do it effectively and avoid mistakes most businesses make when it comes to blogging?
The key is developing customer-centric content, blog consistently, optimize content for search, and promoting your blog to the right audience.
Do you have a business blog? Create one today and begin tapping into all the benefits that come with powerful business blogging.
