Ever considered creating or starting a business blog? Well, this is a guide to help you start a business blog that will open more doors for success for your business.
The fact is that no business is ever satisfied will sales or customers, and with the Internet placing its shadow right on the head of businesses, most feel the necessity to have a decent representation of their brands on the Internet.
With the enormous potential that the Internet offers businesses, there is not enough reason to operate in this era, even in the local setting, without adequate representation on the net.
One of the best things to help build a solid online presence for your business is having a dedicated website to share your business information, increase your brand awareness, generate sales leads, and more.
You can achieve many things on your business website, and I believe that you certainly have or plan to create one for your business.
I suppose here you have one, and if you do, then chances are you’ll like to attract more leads and brand awareness.
It’s undoubtedly competitive because as you make your movements, other companies like yours don’t sleep either, so they are also competing for similar sets of prospects.
I have a question for you,
For your business website, have you considered incorporating a blog?
If you haven’t, you must.
And, if you are skeptical about how to do it, that is the purpose of this article.
So I will lead you through the steps you have to take in starting a blog for your business.
I’ve suggested you consider starting a blog for your business earlier.
Well, let me back my suggestion up with some reasons, but before I jump into that, I’d love you to check some interesting facts about blogging for businesses.
– There are about 1.5 billion sites on the Internet, including 500 million blogs. (SemRush).
– 70% of consumers would instead learn about a business from their blog instead of an advertisement (Blogging Wizard).
– A study made by Hubspot reveals a business with a blog realizes about a 55% increase in website visitors, compared to that which only has a website.
Those mentioned above can be upped by an additional 97% inbound links and 434% indexed pages. (HubSpot).
– 77% of the internet leverage blog posts to derive inspiration, information, and recommendation (OptinMonster).
Now that we have considered the vital stats about blogging let’s look at the benefits of hosting a blog on your website.
Table of Contents
Benefits of a Business Blog
– Establish your business as an industry leader.
– Develop effective relationships with new and existing customers.
– Rank your website higher on search engine result pages.
– Build and promote brand trust.
– Drive more quality leads and promote sales.
– Answer frequently asked questions and discuss your brand mission at length.
– Build your email list.
– Take your business to the next level with a more substantial online presence.
Having read the benefits of blogging and still haven’t made up your mind to attach one to your business website means that you’re going to leave a lot of potential traffic on the table.
If you decide to take this bold action, you might want to consider reading below.
I’ll not only be guiding you through singleton steps but that which will help you achieve a solid foundation that will yield more significant results in your pursuit for success in your business.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a coach, a health care practitioner, an e-commerce store, a software brand, a bookstore, or whatever; the size and type of your business don’t matter here.
What’s important here is to create a business blog that will fit into your goals, help you achieve greater brand awareness, and increase sales for your business.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can start a business blog.
Top 5 Steps to Start a Business Blog
1. Add a Blog to Your Existing Website
While several content management systems are suitable for websites or static pages, a handful gives you better experience and flexibility for blogging.
I am fond of these three, WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace.
However, I will use a generalized approach to adding a blog to your website, emphasizing WordPress.
That’s because different content management systems have different steps to add blogs to a website, but the objectives are a bit similar.
Luckily, adding a blog to your business website is a straightforward process that encompasses turning the blog feature on for any CMS mentioned above.
Suppose your business website has a domain name of http://www.mybusinesswebsite.com.
One of the more popular and recommended ways to add a blog to an existing site is to add a blog as a subdirectory as in http://www.mybusinesswebsite.com/blog.
This method provides you with enough convenience and safety, so you don’t have to complicate things about your site.
To add a blog to your site on WordPress, below is a stepwise tutorial.
Access your WordPress dashboard, and create/add a new page from the pages.
– In the page name field provided, type the blog text.
If you want your blog to show as in the http://www.mybusinesswebsite.com./blog format, you only need to add the name “blog” as the page name; then, you leave the text box below the page name stays empty.
– When you are done writing the name, hit the publish button to save the page, and from there, you must be able to visit the blank page visiting the “/blog” name on your web address bar.
– The blank page has not yet become a blog even with the suffix “/blog,” so you must assign a blog role to it.
From the page settings, you’ll notice that it is on the “static page” default option, so you’ll need to change the option to that of a blog page which you can see from the range of options in the page settings.
With these few steps, you’ve successfully created a business blog and can post updates, but before that, it is essential to specify the number of blog posts you’ll want per page.
To do so,
– Go to settings and click on “Reading,” and a dropdown list appears.
– Choose the blog page you recently created from the list provided.
– Now, you can input from the most section the number of posts you’d want to display on your blog, and anything beyond that, a user needs to click the following button to continue.
So that’s what you do to add a blog to your existing website.
2. Specify Your Goals
Now that you have a blog added to your business website, it is essential to know that while you push yourself for further business opportunities, you also open a new chapter for commitment.
So, you need to overhaul your strategy or incorporate your new blog into it.
First, define your goals, including what you want to accomplish with your blog.
By specifying your goals, you have a direction of where you want to go.
It can be that you want to increase brand awareness, generate sales leads, or pretty much everything you’re willing to accomplish in your new business blog.
3. Develop a content strategy.
Before having a blog built into your business website, the chances are that you don’t have to worry about the Content, but now you do.
So, you need to build a content plan or strategy that deals with the frequency at which you want to post new updates and the kind of Content that yields a better outreach for your brand.
A content strategy, by definition, is an ongoing process that involves the translation of one’s business goals into an action plan by leveraging Content as a tool for reaching your specified goals.
Posting a single blog post in a week is not a bad idea, but it is recommended that you post at least three times a week.
The search engines love taking hints from websites, and if you can give them a clue from which your blog posts go live, they might like it most.
So let’s say you post three times a week, including Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at about seven o’clock.
Once you are consistent in your timing, the search engine crawlers will adapt to this timing and always show up at that period to take and index your Content.
On the other hand, crawlers will also come daily to index your posts if you publish daily.
Visitors will also adore that they could read a new post at a posting specific time.
Your content schedule is only a fraction of your content strategy, but other factors that will affect your strategy include:
– Understanding your target audiences and what they will like to read from you.
– Keeping in mind your current and desired position.
– Finding out who your competitors are.
– Establishing your Key Performance Indicators (KPI), etc.
So mapping a content plan or strategy is essential for the success of your blog.
3. Publish Content
Now that you’ve incorporated a blog into your website, defined your goals, and developed a content strategy, it’s time to begin publishing Content.
That can be straightforward, but if done improperly, it will make your blog never see the light of the day.
Your Content also sells your business to prospective customers, so make sure you invest massively in content marketing.
Below I’ve outlined a few points for making top-notch Content on your business blog.
Solve people’s issues and ensure that the audience derives a specific value for every blog published.
– Although it is essential to post more blog posts consistently, quality is the most important thing.
– Write in plain language and ensure you do everything that will improve the readability of your Content.
– Write engaging posts and make it a duty to reply to comments.
– Leverage the natural placements of keywords after doing keyword research.
– Don’t oversell.
4. Promote Your Blog
After you have done everything required, the most challenging and frustrating part is traffic generation.
Even if you have the best Content globally, no one will know if you don’t set your Content up for viewing.
So, you need to take advantage of various ways to get traffic for your blog, which can include:
– Social media marketing
– Search Engine Optimization
– Email Marketing
– PPC advertising
– Guest blogging, etc.
5. Study Your Progress
Now that you have published your blog with some content in it and leveraged different means for generating traffic, it is essential to take analytical tools to measure your progress.
One good suggested analytics tool is Google Analytics.
It helps you get different insights into your blog performance and the nature of your audience, along with their activities.
This powerful tool can help you measure your progress and help you perform a revamp in your strategy to achieve more significant results.
Final Thoughts
Starting a blog for your business is a straightforward process that brings you more business exposure and opportunities for success, but taking the step means you are ready to be committed to something that can also be demanding.
As they say, “Success comes with its price,” and in this case, it is the extra work needed, consistency required, and the patience you need to attach while you keep noticing steady growth.
Taking the necessary steps and demonstrating commitment puts your business in the position of better chances and opportunities than you might not have imagined with your static website.
While this guide is dedicated to those willing to start a business blog, I wrote it so that even after creating one, it can be helpful to you in ages to come.
So be sure to bookmark this article for future use.
I have a question before you go, so you can answer it in the comments section that follows.
To what extent are you interested in starting a blog for your business?
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