Blogging benefits small businesses in so many ways. Blogging helps to establish yourself as the expert in your field, drive traffic to your site, and allows you to engage with your readers and build your community of loyal followers. A successful blog post could bring flood of visitors to your website!
Furthermore, the search engines love content-rich websites. Sites that have lots of originial and quality content generally get good rankings on the search engines.
And the most effective way to add high quality content is to add a blog to your website. A blog allows you to quickly and easily supply fresh content to your site. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you can definitely compose and publish a blog post.
It’s been shown that companies that blog generate over 50% more visitors and leads/sales than those who don’t. That should be a big motivation factor right there!
What You Should Blog About?
Most people struggle with topics to blog about. Let me give you some ideas…
First, put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and think about the problems they want to solve, the information that can help them with their businesses, the news or updates that are relevant to them.
Here are some additional topics you can blog about:
- News/stories within your industry
- Answers to common questions that your customers ask you
- New services or products that your business just introduced
- Tips and secrets that help teach your audience to ease their pains, perform their jobs better, or enrich their lives.
- Interviews with experts in your industry
- Discuss future trends
- Discuss controversial issues
- Provide reviews of other people’s products, services, books, blogs, etc.
- Anything related to your industry, business or your employees.
The purpose of blogging is to inform, educate, update, entertain, and tickle or stimulate your visitors. For example, if you have a dry cleaning business, you can blog about “green” dry cleaning process. If you are an accountant, you can blog about ways to reduce your tax bill. If you’re a dentist, you can blog about the importance of flossing. Giving tips is a great blogging idea. You can give tips to help your readers learn more or understand more about the topics related to your business.
Which Blogging Platform to Use
There are a couple of blogging platforms that you can use. The two most popular are blogger.com and wordpress.org. My choice is WordPress.org due to the wide variety of free plug-ins available. Plug-ins are scripts written by individuals to provide additional functionalities to WordPress. WordPress has a big and powerful collection of plug-ins.
Most web hosting companies give you a one click installation of a wordpress blog using SimpleScript or Fantasico. It’s very easy and straight forward to install a blog. There are lots of free as well as paid themes that you can use to quickly setup your blog.
However, you should look for WordPress themes that have built in strong SEO functionalities and attractive looking designs.
The Best WordPress Themes Used by Professionals
The 2 best wordpress themes that meet my criteria of having strong built in SEO functionalities and attractive looking designs are the StudioPress and Thesis Themes. These 2 themes are 2 of the most popular WordPress themes used by many small businesses.
Bloggin Best Practices
Here are some blogging best practices to follow:
- Post unique and high quality content as much as possible. Again, tips related content make great blog posts and appreciated by the readers. The minimum should be at least once a week. The length for a post should be between 400 to 600 words. You should also try to solicit for feedback and comments from your readers.
- Have a compelling headline that intrigues and hooks the readers and make them to want to read your blog post to find out more…
- Include videos, images, and infographics when possible to make your post more captivating. You can host your videos on Youtube and just embed the Youtube video in your blog post.
- Make use of the Google keyword tool to find keywords that have high number of searches. If you own a local business, make sure you optimize your blog posting by incorporating the location keywords into the title, description, headlines, and throughout the body of the post. Optimize your blog post for the long tail keywords (keywords with 4 or more words in them) since those keywords usually drive the most targeted and relevant traffic.
- Link back to the main pages on your website from your blogging articles using relevant keywords as the anchor texts. Building internal links to the primary pages (home page as well as the different product and service pages) help boost SEO performance of these pages.
- Perform SEO for your blog and each of your blog post using best SEO practices. These include making sure that each web post gets indexed and doing proper on-page SEO and Off-Page SEO (link building) practices.
To learn more about blogging, you can do a search on Google for wordpress tutorials or visit Youtube to find video tutorials on how to setup a blog. Additionally, you can check out the websites below for more information:
Again, blogging is one of the best inbound marketing strategies. Blogging helps build brand awareness, bring free traffic to your site, and generate leads/sales for your business. It may take lots of time and works, but it’s worth it!