Blogging is a must for small business owners that are willing to go beyond the fold in making profits from their businesses.
A more significant percentage of the world population makes use of the internet on a daily basis, blogging presents a platform for reaching out to the internet audience.
Below are 20 blogging tips for small business owners, if you have been running a business blog or planning on starting a blog, then these tips are for you.
Blogging Tips for Business Success
Design and Graphics
Using a generic theme on your blog may hurt the branding effort. If you are not knowledgeable enough then hiring an expert to help out with creating a custom design, a good logo, and a blog layout with easy navigation would go a long way in keeping visitors on your blog.
If the design is poorly done, it will increase the blog bounce rate.
Thus, the initial purpose of starting the blog would be defeated. It cost less than ₦20,000 to hire an expert to design a WordPress blog with a custom theme. Remember, it’s your online mini-office it must look useful to customers.
Keyword Research
Proper keyword research helps channel the right audience to your blog, it’s a vital part of the blogging process, and failure to conduct appropriate keyword research before starting a small business blog can be likened to starting a business without proper feasibility studies.
You should know what you’re up against, your competitors, the average volume search for your targeted keyword, all these would give insight into how you can successfully outrun your competitors and direct the right traffic to your blog.
Outsourcing
As a small business owner, it’s almost impossible to dedicate enough time to blogging and running your business; blogging requires a high level of dedication. Hence, it’s expedient that you outsource the task to freelancers.
If your writing skills are not top-notch, hire a good writer, and discuss your blog post idea together, outsourcing increases your productivity. There is various platform where you can hire experts with little budget.
Branding
Like offline businesses, it’s vital to create a brand online, make use of social networks, create a brand name for your small business online, use your logo as profile pictures on all your profile.
Creating your image with a watermark is another way of branding your online content. The concept of branding your small business blog is to be unique, standing out amidst the crowd.
Analytics
Install Google analytics tools on your blog; it’s a way of measuring your progress from time to time, the device provides detailed data of visitor’s behaviors, where your traffic is coming from, popular search terms, which page is doing well, and how to optimize your blog for better result.
Google Analytics should be one of the first plugins to install when setting up your blog (for WordPress users). Knowing what you’re doing wrong gives room for correction and improvement.
Quality and Quantity
The grammatical and typographical errors would prevent your readers from understanding the message, vetting through every blog post, twice before posting it on your blog goes a long way in ensuring professionalism.
On the issue of how long a typical blog post should be, recently, I did a short study on successful blogs, and here is what I came up with; most of them write an entertaining articles not less than 1000 words count.
I’ve seen a post with over 3000 words; the key is to publish an insightful post and refrain from making the article dull.
Interviews and Webinars
Publishing fresh content from time to time is a good idea, organizing handouts and webinars is an excellent way to establish a personal relationship with your reader, it further corroborates your claim of being an expert in the business you’re running.
To spice things up, you can also create an interview column on your blog where you interview successful entrepreneurs in your niche and ask questions that would benefit your audience. You can also seek interview opportunities on popular blogs within your niche.
Newsletters and Subscription
When I love the content of a blog, the next thing I do is find the email subscription blog. As a result, it’s advisable that you create a subscription box on your blog, where readers can sign up for the free newsletter and get notified of the new blog post.
Email promotion is good, but you should avoid spamming your subscribers with emails, often you’re indirectly telling them to unsubscribe when you keep sending them “spammy” emails now and then. Sending out a newsletter, preferably once a week is an excellent way to stay in touch.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It’s a bit tricky, but there is a fraction of the basis. The higher the number of links pointing to your blog (or a particular page on your blog) the higher your position on the search engine result page, that’s like a drop in the ocean of what SEO is all about, there are on-page SEO, off-page SEO, e.t.c.
SEO is crucial in the world of blogging; it takes a bit of technicality (doing it the right way) to get the correct result.
You can learn the nitty-gritty as you continue in your journey as a blogger, or invest in hiring an SEO expert to handle the optimization aspect of your blog for you.
I would advise that you focus on creating quality content in your early days than focusing on dedicating your energy to SEO.
Guest Post
As part of the SEO and blog promotion quest, sending out a blog post as often as possible helps to put the word out there about the existence of your blog, and increase the traffic to your blog.
Sending out an insightful post to popular blogs in your niche helps promote your blog, when you publish a detailed article on another popular blog, readers would follow the link on your author box back to your blog.
Although it’s becoming challenging to get an opportunity for guest blogging on popular blogs, genuine interest and personal relationship with blog owners would go a long way in securing a guest post opportunity on a popular blog in your niche.
Relationship with Other Bloggers
As a blogger (probably a newbie), you need the help of other bloggers in your niche before you get your foot on the ground and understand how the system works, visiting their blogs frequently, leaving insightful comments, and sharing their blog posts across your media platform is a right way of creating a personal relationship with other bloggers in your niche.
You can send out friendly emails, and run a few blog post ideas by them, tell them things you would like to read on their blog, send out a tweet to their handles, appreciating them for disseminating insightful information, your goal is to create a relationship that would last long.
Readers Relationship
Running a blog like a robot is not a good idea; your blog should be treated like a community, where you interact with your reader.
Thank your readers for reading your blog post, providing a quality response to their inquiries, and letting them know you care about each one of them.
It’s good to address readers by their names. Personally, it gives me the impression that my opinion counts.
Social Media
The advantages of social media cannot be overemphasized; you don’t just publish your content and ‘hope’ for the best, NO!
No matter how original your article is, you’re expected to make a conscious effort in directing readers to your blog post. Social media is the most effective way to achieve this.
Create a profile for your blog on Twitter, Facebook, stumble upon e.t.c. Share the contents of your blog through this channel, thus giving it a chance to go viral.
Information Hub
When writing a blog post, always ask yourself, “Why should people read this post?” If you can’t provide an honest answer as to why then it shows your blog post is not valuable.
Make your blog an information hub in your niche, write extensively on what people want to know about, solve problems, share ideas, answer questions, and be creative with each post.
Blog Posting, How Frequent?
I would give a brief comment on how frequently a blogger should post on his/her blog.
There is no orthodox rule as to when and how, but it’s essential to be consistent with your posting if your goal is to publish a post per day, then make sure a day never goes by without editing a post.
It makes it easier for the search engine to crawl your website from time to time. Always give your reader enough time to digest your previous post before publishing another one.
Email List
As a small business owner, creating an email list is one of the core purposes of blogging, it allows you to contact your reader and tell him about your product and services regularly.
Inserting a subscription button on your sidebar and the end of every post is a way to increase your subscriber, you can also offer free eBook (It must be your intellectual property, or you must have copyright over it) for download, and during the process, you get them to input their email.
Product/Service Promotion
Promoting your business or service on your blog should be done smartly; you don’t want to shove your offer down readers’ throats at every given opportunity.
Be creative with promotion, do it in such a way that it does not offend your read, and at the same time it appeals to them.
Blog Promotion
At first, it might be difficult getting visitors to your blog; you can promote your blog using various methods ranging from sponsored posts on Facebook to Google AdWords and other ways of direct traffic to your blog.
The referral is the best way to get a loyal reader is through the organic traffic method, and this can only be done by optimization and publishing valuable content.
Freebies
Blog sales are excellent ways of attracting visitors, offering a discount to customers from your blog would go a long way in promoting your online presence.
You can create a coupon code or card for users that access your product or service through your blog. Blog hosting companies do this a lot; you can also model your business after the idea.
Be Consistent
It’s a rough, lonely road at the beginning, if you’re consistent with a no-looking-back attitude, you will survive it. Don’t be over-optimistic as this might hinder your enthusiasm during the first three months.
Keep writing and sharing, adjusting, and before you know it, you would be in the pro league.
What other tips are you implementing on your business to ensure your success online?
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