Blogging is a mind boggling tactic, you need to know your customer inside out, your offering and your product/service. How you use blogging can vary depending on your business, for example if you’re based locally, internationally, a charity, for profit, software company. All of these factors will influence how you interact with customers and as a result your tactics will change.
Blogging can also be done in many different ways depending on your end goal and its here where we see a lot of people misalign their goals and failing to see the true potential of blogging.
There are three ways your content content can be used when blogging.
Brand Awareness
These are awards, product announcements, client and staff mentions, you might include them in your newsletter as well to update people on your progress as a company. In my opinion you’ll rarely if not never see any business from this type of blogging.
Social Media (click bait)
Next type of blogging is for social media, short pieces of content with quick punchlines to keep your audience entertained. They generally have catchy headlines and visitors will only find this content every time its promoted on your social media channels
Search Engine Optimisation
I might be a bit biased here but in my opinion blogging for SEO has the best return. You write the blog once, do a bit of promotion and you might top it up with a bit more promotion every now and again but it feeds a constant stream of people to your site if done right.
Easier Said Than Done
The last paragraph skims over content writing and promotion very quickly which is what a lot of blog posts do on the matter of blogging and SEO. it makes it sound simple, write a blog posts and do a little bit of promotion and you’ll be inundated with leads but unfortunately it’s not as simple as that when starting off.
You first have to identify who’s searching for what and write about what your customers want or need help with. Answering difficult questions will nearly always get people to your site but if you want to drastically increase the number you’ll need to promote it.
While its all well and good to post about your blogs and social media and in the groups you’re active in, you need to look at your blog posts like mini PR campaigns. If other people aren’t linking back to them you’ll really struggle to see a volume of traffic coming to your blog. You need to go out and tell people about your blogs. Here are some ways you can do that.
- Look for similar blogs, reach out to those people and ask them to add your link to an existing piece of content
- Look for outdated content that links to content similar content of yours. Ask to update that content or to update the link to a more relevant one.
- Use your partners to link back to your new post
Without links google won’t see your blog as having any authority and its vital that you do get google to see your posts as authoritative. Without this sort of promotion you realistically won’t get any visitors to your post, or no significant volume anyway.