Why?
The ultimate goal of a blog for business is to develop, nurture, and convert leads into sales. This is done by offering useful tips and resources regarding your industry’s services while simultaneously optimizing for keywords. By doing so, you attract and build trust with your audience, and when they are ready to purchase, the likelihood that they choose your company is much higher.
More specifically, blogging:
• Is important because search engines like Google value websites with fresh content (blog posts)
• Adds pages to your website, which is also important to search engines
• Enables your company to become more searchable by relevant keywords; SEO benefits
• Demonstrates your industry expertise to a broad audience; makes you a thought-leader
• Provides a non-intrusive forum to reach leads on a consistent basis
• Increases the ability of your website to have pages shared through social media
• Helps you stay on the cutting edge of your industry
• Allows you to capture leads through RSS, email subscription signups
How
1. Develop an execution plan for maintaining your blog for business
Think about these questions when writing the plan:
a. Who can write for your blog? (employees? Customers? Blog writing service? Other industry experts?)
b. How often will you post new articles? (At least once per week.)
c. How long will each post be? (About 500 words.)
2. Technically develop your blog for business
a. You can start a blog for free on Blogger or WordPress, or have your web developer created a custom blog for your site. Blogger is all free, and WordPress charges for upgrades like migrating the blog to a subdomain and editing CSS. WordPress is technically superior and is better set up for SEO than Blogger, but creating a custom template is better than both of them.
b. Have your web developer set up a sub domain like blog.yourcompanyname.com. Make sure if you use Blogger or WordPress that you map the blog to your sub domain and drop the.blogspot and.WordPress from the Blog URL. If you do not drop these, Blogger and WordPress will get all the SEO credit.
c. Research appropriate keywords on Google AdWords. The title and description of your blog should be centered around your #1 keyword.
3. Title Writing, keyword embedding, and blog for business structure
a. Titles should include a major keyword. For example, New Balance would like to be searched for terms like “running shoes”.
b. Rewrite permalinks: Depending on what blogging service you use, there will be different ways to change the link for each blog post. This post, for example, has a keyword permalink: blog-for-business. If you are using Blogger, title the article with just the keyword, post it, then go back and edit the article title with a compelling title. This allows you to get a keyword in the link, while keeping a must-read title.
c. Title writing is just as important as the content of the post. You want to optimize the title for relevant keywords as described above, and then change it to something compelling. Proven phrases within titles that increase blog viewership include: “How to…”, lists including numbers like “8 ways to…”, celebrity names, and dramatic phrases like “10 Things Every Marketer Must Know Today.”
d. Reach out to writers through crowd sourcing. You can send questions to experts in many industries using a site called H.A.R.O. (Help A Reporter Out) to get answers to questions on a national scale.
e. A good strategy for gaining viewership is to use local business success stories. For example, I interviewed a local jewelry company that ran a very successful social media campaign around the holidays for a blog post, and when I posted it on Twitter, I sent it to them and they retweeted it to their network of followers.
f. When you find keywords that you’d like to be searched by and that have relatively low competition, write them in to your blog posts a few times. This will encourage search engines to associate those key terms with your post and place your post higher in the results.
g. Lastly it is important to describe any images that you place in your posts with relevant alt tags. This will enable Google and other search engines to recognize the images and place you higher in the results according to your alt tags.
4. Develop a plan for promoting your blog for business
Here are some promotional tips that will help your blog grow its following:
a. Write a few posts to get some practice. Then develop an insightful, helpful post and email it out to your network of contacts asking them to forward it to anyone that would be interested in following the blog.
b. Post your blog pieces on Facebook, Twitter, relevant LinkedIn groups, and Digg.
c. Posts should be submitted to article submission sites with links to your blog and website.
d. Blog should have social sharing options so that users can easily retweet your post, share it on Facebook, or send it out in an email.
e. Blog should also be on all marketing materials, email signature, etc.
f. Comment thoughtfully on similar blogs with links to your blog.
g. Consider attracting industry experts with extensive networks to write a guest blog post for you: you get a quality post, save some of your own time, and most of all, they will promote your blog through their own network.
