Starting a Blog for Your Business
Your biggest competitor has a blog…you want a place on your website to showcase your achievements…you want to create fun content for people to share on Facebook and Twitter… You may have several reasons to create a blog for your business, but you don’t quite know how to get started.
57 percent of businesses with a blog have gained a customer from that blog, according to HubSpot.
A blog should be the focal point of your digital marketing strategy:
- It gives you a platform to tell the world what makes your brand unique.
- It brings life and energy to an otherwise static website.
- It can entice future customers to engage with your brand.
With a regularly-updated blog, new consumers are more likely to discover your brand for the first time, especially in search engine results and social media feeds.
While creating the blog itself can be a straightforward task, you should keep these things in mind as you get started, in order to get the most out of your blogging efforts:
Choose a platform that’s right for you.
If you don’t have a web developer and don’t want to spend money creating the blog, you can get started quickly with WordPress.com, Blogger, Tumblr or a number of other platforms.
If you want to host a blog on your own web address, this can be done through just about any of the major hosting services (DreamHost, Network Solutions, 1and1, GoDaddy, etc.). These services are simple to use and generally allow you to start building your blog within a few minutes.
At MyMobileLyfe, we use DreamHost to host several of our WordPress.org blogs (examples here and here): it allows us to give our clients sophisticated and flexible blogs and websites.
Make sure your blog is viewable on all screen sizes.
Smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming preferred options for web browsing, and if your blog isn’t readable on these devices, you will lose out on attracting mobile customers.
Fortunately, most new blog templates are responsive: simply choose the one you like, and test your pages on a variety of screens to make sure your message is getting across clearly to everyone.
Update your blog on a regular basis!
It takes commitment to post to your blog each day, especially when you are responsible for every other aspect of your business. But without frequent and timely updates, your blog won’t serve any purpose, and you won’t attract new users to your site.
If you don’t have the time to write content for your blog, MyMobileLyfe is here to help! We offer a number of blog post creation packages to suit your brand’s needs.
Optimize your posts for maximum exposure in search engine results.
There are certainly a lot of complexities behind Google’s search algorithms, and many experts have written many articles on search engine optimization (SEO). But there are things that you can do to improve your blog’s search engine ranking, even if you aren’t an SEO expert.
To start, keep your blog post titles short and focused on one key term. Any given post should be centered on a single topic to begin with, and your post title should give readers an accurate idea of what they will see when they click on your link.
And write your blog posts in a natural style: don’t attempt to stuff keywords into every line of your text. This makes for an unpleasant reader experience, and it will hurt your search engine ranking as well.
To compare keywords you may want to use for your blog posts, check out Google Trends. You can see how much certain keywords have been used over time, relative to each other, and you can see data for specific countries and regions.
Share your blog posts.
Creating compelling content for your blog is only half the battle: now you need to get your posts in front of readers!
Share your posts on any social media channels associated with you or your brand. Add images, ask for feedback from your followers, and experiment by posting at different times throughout the day. The more you do this, the more you will learn about your followers: then you will know how and when to engage with them.
Paid social media posts can expand your content’s reach as well. You can target users in specific locations who have interests related to your brand. With this investment, you can reach new users and build your social following.
Even with the rise of social media, email campaigns are still a very effective means of distribution. Create a newsletter with your latest posts and send it every month, every week, or even daily if you have enough new content to share. MailChimp is a widely-used tool that can help you accomplish this.
Track your success, and repeat!
You’ve created your blog, and your posts are appearing in search engines and social media feeds. Now it’s time to see who’s viewing your content!
Google Analytics is commonly used to track website performance. You can see how many times your post has been viewed, how long users stay on your blog, how those users were referred to your pages and much, much more. It’s free to use, and if you’re on WordPress, you can easily implement it using a plugin like this.
If you notice that certain topics resonate more with your readers, create more posts on those topics! The best part about tracking your metrics is that you can make changes to your content strategy immediately and see how it affects your blog traffic.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything you can do to make your brand’s blog a success, but it should help you get started.
Let us know if you’ve started a blog for your business, and tell us what kind of effect it has had on your bottom line.
And if you want help with the creation of your blog, don’t be shy! Contact MyMobileLyfe today and let us know how we can help.
