1. Top Reasons why businesses required a blog
Top Reasons why any business required a blog
1. An Entry Point:
At the very first, business blog is a wonderful tool for both small and large businesses. It provides unique opportunity to build brand royalty and build relationships with customers and public. It also considers as a very good entry point to the endless world of opportunities through internet marketing. Unlike traditional methods to find business, i.e. Yellow Pages and other physical directories, people feel searching online is more comfortable and time saving to find required products and services. Having a well SEO optimized business blog gives an opportunity to present your product and services to the prospective customers when they searches for the same using specific keyword combinations that you have already optimized with your blog.
2. Customer Engagement
Through having methods to engage users through social media like Twitter and Facebook attached to your websites, and adding options to subscribe updates would help the customers and subscribers get updated with latest information, product, services from your business. This would also helpful to get lots of referrals and thus more and more customers regularly and frequently.
3. Long-term sustainability:
Long-term sustainability through building relationships with customers, boosting the brand loyalty and grow the business for the years to come. Building trust with your customers lead to brand royalty and of course to more business thus.
Why Should You Start a Blog for Your Business
Above paragraph have well defined the reasons why each business required a business blog. In this section, specifically informing the advantages of having your own business blog.
1. Superior Marketing Tool:
Business blogs can be a superior marketing tools by effectively utilizing it to promote your products and service to the online community. It can also provide an opportunity to discuss about forth coming products to the publish and build business. this can also use for promoting products and promotions from other companies too, to add value to the visitors and customers.
2. Boost sales:
Business blogs are an excellent tools to boost sales through providing latest news on products and services instantly. It can also useful to provide exclusive tips to the customers to boos sales and add value to the business.
3. Customer Satisfaction:
Business blogs are excellent platform to boost customer satisfaction. It offers great way to get feedback and answers to the customer queries. Building emotional attachment to the business certainly boost customer loyalty and repeated purchases.
4. Communication:
Brand message and other communication between customers can be easy through a business blog. Consistent branding leads to a sense of security and stability for customers, which are two of the main factors needed to build customer loyalty.
Step By Step to Create a Successful Business blog
Creation of a business blog is not a or two step process. Lots of planning on various factors that affect the success would be considered and planned properly. Continuous efforts to improve the quality of business blog is a most necessary part to pull the business to a real success. Business blogs should have clear idea on what want to blog and who will be the readers, tone, style and content of your blog. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from blogging, your blog is not likely to achieve success. Here is the step by step guide to create a better business blog by considering various core success factors i.e. SEO, Branding, Traffic, Authority etc.
1. Select a blogging service:
It is preferable to create a blog in either Blogger or WordPress, both are free blogging platforms. It would take less than 10 minutes to create a basic business blog.
2. Have Own Domain Name:
Once you have created basic blog in any of the free blogging space i.e. WordPress or blogger, your blog address would look like mybusinessblog.wordpress.com or mybusinessblog.blogger.com. Never leave your blog in this free original domain as it is, but should have your own domain name by purchasing a name from providers such as GoDaddy or BlueHost etc. I personally prefer GoDaddy because of its SEO optimization are considerably good compare with other hosting providers. Having your own domain name have lots of benefits like simple, easy to remember domain name with words associated with your original business. For example, if you have gardening tool business and have created a free blog in blogger named gardeningtools.blogspot.com. This free address is considerable long for customers and visitors to remember. Once after purchasing your domain name your address would comes as www.gardeningools.com. This name is more optimized with your gardening tool business than the previous free address and very helpful for visitors to remember your website address easily.
3. Select a Blog Theme:
Selection of a blog theme is important as your business. Theme decided whether the visitors to stay more in the blog or leave early. Before deciding any theme, it is mandatory to decide the required features of your business blog. Once listed with the required features, you can hunt for themes that offers the features or allow to extend the theme to include the features. One of the technique to understand the beautiful, required features are visiting well known business blog and understand how they maintaining it and the features in it. This would help you to decide required features of your business blog too and find a right theme offers the same. Offering features that is helpful for readers in variety of way is a good technique for visitors to sustain and having attachments with your blog. Providing features that helpful visitors to know about latest offers, promotions, reviews, free e-books, useful apps like useful stuffs would force visitors to attach to the blog and subscribe the the newsletters. This would also help getting more and more new visitors and customers to your business. You have options to choose consultants and developers to create your own blog theme. However, selection of such vendors should be done carefully upon their reputation, capability, fees and etc.. What I suggest is to get a right blog by paying bit amount and alter it on your way to include all the features. Getting a free template that offers all these features would be awesome! If you have skills on programming, this way is the highly recommended one.
4. Practice SEO and Promotion Techniques:
Most great blogs have not became famous through a fortnight sensation. There are lots of effort behind the success of these blog. Patience must be practices and implemented. Success of business blog depends on various factors that can realize in a progressive way. Business blog owners have options to select SEO service to get their blog popularized. However selection of SEO service required careful approach. SEO service providers should be reputed, ready to work with your specifications to achieve required result, should have sufficient, comfortable client base and able to provide case studies and reports that have uniqueness. I am soon writing another featured post of the selection of SEO and on what all are the things to consider while selection of the SEO service. Learning some search engine optimization techniques would help you in this part along with search engine marketing parts. There are lots stuff freely available on this in the net to refer and practice the best.
5. What, When and Who to blog
Deciding what to blog, when to blog and who should blog, have supreme influence to the popularization of your business blog. Good content that attract huge visitors bring the blog to the next level of popularity, very easily. In the same time, good content blogging in wrong time, written by amateurs would not give the desired result. What, when and who to blog thus has importance.
What to blog: In a business blog, then content should be straight to the business and written in an interesting way. There are lots of methods can be used to get user attraction slowly but steadily. Typical blogging should have a mix of contents to be selected to blog.
For example:
– Product reviews that have very genuine – Interviews with people who are in your niche industry – New stories on the products and round-ups with pas month interesting products and stories – Write-ups on conferences – Product launches in advance – Tips on various products – Ultimate guides and free guides relevant to your products and businesses – Advice and recommendations from specialists All the above considered as the best contents to be blogged in any business blog in a systematic way to get visitors attracted and build huge reader base with high loyalty.
When to blog: There is a misconception in the bloggers world that the blog have more content will get popularized easily. This is just a myth. Even blogger who blogs once in a or twice week have got popularized than frequent bloggers. How much to blog is not matter, but how worthy it is and when to blog are the real players. The day and time to post your blog should be selected carefully depends on the Geo-location you are focusing too. For example, If you frequently post in your blog at midnight, it would be difficult to get noticed by prospective customers and your subscribers. Same would be applicable if you blog in the weekends too. So carefully select the days and time to post your blogs with an intention to reach to maximum people.
Who to blog: Writing content with amateur bloggers is not at all a good idea. As a business owner, it would be recommended to write your own blog posts. If you are not a good writer, specialized bloggers needs to be selected or appointed to do so. always remember, business blogs are not ordinary blogs but meant for business. To build business, required measures to be taken to reach to the public in a structured and well planned way.
6. Promote your business blog
Promotion of business blog is one of the real pain of business bloggers. Most of them not aware of the methods to be used to promote their blogs. Promotion simply mean to take your contents and messages to the public. This can be achieved using various techniques. Always remember, search engine optimization have superior influence in this step. Your blog must be planned well and implemented search engine (SEO) optimization and make keyword rich to appear in front of people when they searching for products and services using specific keyword terms. Renting or appointing professional, trustworthy SEO service processionals can be a great help and can be utilized here.
Social Media – Social medias such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest contributing greatly to promote business. As a business blogger, you can use the services of these famous social media networks to promote your blog, products and services to a great extend. Specialized guides and free books on how to use various social media networks freely available in the net to refer and practice.
Forums and Groups – Joining and engaging with relevant forums and groups considered as a best way to promote your blog, products and services. Selecting of consumer forums and groups and posting regularly with your updates would help attracting lots of visitors. Always engaging forum members through questions and reply to the commends and questions would also helpful to build community around you and your blog. This would ultimately result more and frequent visitors to your business blog and later turn an prospective customers.
One of the frequent mistake committing by bloggers are, they will never reply to the comments and questions from the readers in their blog. This would lead the readers to stay away by not getting what they exactly required from your end. Engaging readers thus has high importance to the success of any business blog by interacting with them and providing what they exactly looking for.
Build name brand – One of the success secret is to build your name as a brand in the public. Once people trust you, then you can turn them to your own way.
Offers and freebies – Offers and freebies to the visitors and readers is a widely using technique to promote blog and get more customers. If you visit the big bloggers, you can freely find offers of free books and other relevant materials. This technique can be implemented perfectly to any business blog by offering free, useful things to the visitors and customers.
Eminent Tips to Better Business Blogging
1. Think Like Your Customers
Think and arrange the contents in your blog like what your customers want. Categorize it in an eye catching way thus customers can find the details as fast as the need. Your categories must match their expectations, because they’re unlikely to make an effort to search for additional information once they land on your business blog. If meaningful content isn’t available at their fingertips and with the click of the mouse, they’ll go elsewhere for it. Great categories can make the difference by keeping them attached to your blog longer.
2. Keep the List Short and Sweet
A long list of categories is cumbersome and clutters your business blog. Customers won’t take the time to read through a long list of category links trying to find something relevant to their own lives. Focus on short list of tips and categories that speaks out about customer needs.
3. Super contents and ‘Secret’ type information
Focus to create contents, information, ‘secret tips’ that people can’t fine anywhere else. Unique and comprehensive collections of resources would bring more user and customer attentions to attach with your blog always. Start with content that solves a problem for readers, resonates with interests, trends and that’s easy to attract visitors.
4. Engage users
Never show your ego to the users and visitors to your blog. Engage the visitors by ask questions, respond quickly to their queries and questions regularly and and qualitatively. Collecting best comments and recognizing users would be awesome to make the user a feel of getting attention to them. Asking questions to users and compiling best answers to blog posts is another eminent method to engage users and popularize your blog.
5. Use Social Media and E-Mail Eminently
Use available social medial networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIN to to ask questions and compile answers. Making valuable comments to the industry influential, tweeting their posts all would lead to get great guest articles from such people that would later attract lots of visitors. You can also use email based interview to such credible people to post in your blog.
6. Let People Contact You Easily
Make it easy for people to contact you.People love to ask personal questions and queries to experts and feel comfortable whenever they are getting helpful answers promptly.
And finally, the success of any blog depends on clear goals, effort and more than that, how you able to know your customers. Once you are able to understand the nerve points of customers, it is easy for you to turn them to your own way.