Blogging to Take Your Business to the Next Level

The concept of blogging needs no introduction. Chances are you might be following at least a couple of blogs regularly or even attempted to run a blog yourself. Have you ever thought of blogging as a powerful tool to improve your sales and increase your brand visibility? Read on to find out how much you are losing out on today’s competitive world without engaging in blogging for your business. The benefits of a business blog:

• A Blog is an effective tool to build your social media footprint and establish your brand image and earn people’s trust.
• Helps you position yourself as a thought leader in your area of expertise. Get more speaking engagements or invitations to attend and showcase your services.
• Gives you an opportunity to communicate your expertise and establish your business as a great resource for your target audience.
• Helps improve your search engine optimization – Blogging increases the chances of your website appearing on the search engines for the terms related to your market, thereby giving you a lot of visibility.
• Social media buzz: If you are successful in providing valuable, interesting and resourceful content by blogging, your content spreads on the social media like a wildfire, and brings your brand a lot of attention in return.

Essentials of Blogging:

• The Platform: WordPress is the most preferred blogging platform. It is free, secure and open-source content management system that offers great flexibility and easy integration with your current website. Download for free from WordPress.org
• The Design: Hire a PHP developer and a designer to integrate the wordpress blog to your current website. You can get this done for less than Rs. 10,000 if you know where to look!
• The Content: The life blood of the blog. Use Google to find out the likely search-terms your audience might be using to find you. For example, if you are a real estate consultant, by typing in ‘real estate market’, you can find a lot of suggestions by Google to write awesome topics, more than enough to get you started with!UberSuggest.orgis highly recommended to find such ideas with the click of a button. Additionally, below are some of the best ideas for a blog:
  • How to posts
  • Reviews
  • Lists
  • Tips
  • Pros & Cons
  • Facts pages
  • Checklists
  • Blueprints
  • Worksheets
• The Call-to-Actions: End your blog with a strong call to action. A simple statement like the one below can work wonders when used appropriately.
• The Social Sharing: Make sure to include the social media buttons on your blog posts to facilitate a one-click social sharing.

Measuring Your Blog’s Success: While there is much debate about the return on investment for time spent in social media, the results of blogging are easier to evaluate: unique visitors, comments, interactions, time on site and other metrics can help businesses learn about customer interests and pain points. Use Google Analytics (free) to measure the reach of your blog. Google Analytics integrates with wordpress seamlessly to provide you real-time results of the user activities on your blog. It shows you the sources of the visitor, the time spent on your blog, the country and the region of the visitor, the number of visits, the keywords that attracted the most visits, etc. Based on the data, you can create more content that your audience will love. As you embark on your business blogging journey, prepare for a workload tied to content management. Build an editorial calendar and start adding to it some resources that you already have lying around, such as whitepapers, informative brochures and industry reports. We recommend that you involve a few more people in the content creation process. Offer your team members some kind of rewards at the end of the quarter for contributing the best blog content!

Happy Blogging!