We’ve talked a lot about business blogging in our previous posts over the years, here are a few:
https://opace.agency/blog/simple-ways-to-generate-more-blog-traffic;
We continue to receive questions from our clients regarding the subject, particularly as part of their wider content marketing strategies and how to make business blogging successful.
Is It Worth Your Time?
With this being the case, we wanted to take a look at the state of blogging for businesses in particular and let you know if it’s worth investing time into. Is it worth having a company blog when features such as Instagram Stories, Twitter, Facebook and an ever-growing list of social networks exist to keep you in contact with your customers?
Many people think that to do successful content marketing, they must make a choice between different tools in order to make contact with their clients and broadcast their messages.
This couldn’t be further from the truth – having a fully integrated approach to content marketing that utilises social media platforms and blogging platforms together is essential when it comes to gaining an advantage over your competition. The question isn’t which method you should use, but rather how can you efficiently utilise these different tools for your business.
If you have a Content Management System like WordPress for your website, congratulations! You are in a great position to start publishing blog content and integrating it with your social media channels. If you don’t, fear not! – there are blogging platforms you can access for free such as https://wordpress.com. However, this will be hosted externally by default which results in users being taken away from your website and to the blog provider, so will need a bit of configuring to deliver click-throughs back to your own website.
Business blogging from the comfort of your laptop.
Photo by Nick Morrison Unsplash
What Are the Benefits of Business Blogging in 2019?
The first obvious reason is that you get to establish yourself as an authority in your field, keeping your clients and prospects updated about new insights, products and services related to your industry.
This is a great way to get content out that isn’t just filler but truly useful and unique content which will generate natural interest over time. As a side note, it is very important to be consistent with your content – this will be beneficial in terms of your brand maintaining reader interest.
SEO benefits
Another big benefit of having a business blog, are the SEO implications. It’s more important than ever to try and improve SEO and search rankings as part of a wider content marketing strategy. Blogging can be a great way to improve your results when it comes to SEO, especially when you focus on creating useful content and think carefully about what questions your potential and existing customers may be searching for. See more on this in our recent SEO predictions article regarding Featured Snippets.
Obviously, it’s important that you optimise your content with appropriate metadata and keywords to give you the best chance of being listed and found in search, but don’t overdo the SEO. Keep your content natural and designed for your target audience. These days, we’re seeing ‘over optimisation’ of keywords doing far more damage than good.
If you decide to publish weekly posts, you can theme your content to your social networks in accordance with the subject matter of the blog. This unified continuity in regards to subject matter can help bring people from your blog to your social media channels and vice versa, and also engages users that might not otherwise have chance to read your blog post but can catch snippets of your weekly message by way of Twitter or Instagram Stories (whichever is more appropriate).
By now in 2019, most of us are somewhat desensitised to many forms of advertising and almost ignore traditional ads without even realising. Therefore, it’s important for businesses to adapt and sell indirectly without pushing products and services down the throats of potential customers.
It’s as important as ever to establish yourself as an expert and be the ‘go to’ source of information when the need arises for customers to use your product or service.
Brainstorm, Write, Schedule, Repeat
Don’t be overwhelmed at the prospect of writing and maintaining a blog post in conjunction with your social media platforms.
The best way to tackle blogging is to brainstorm with your team or even individually to get some useful ideas together. You can even do this if your team are based remotely using third-party tools.
Don’t just leave it until the day to write your content. Have some time to plan and think about what type of content your readers would gain a genuine benefit from, whether that’s tips, FAQs, fixing common issues etc. Once you have an idea down, great! You can keep the idea to one side until you have a time window over the next few days where you can try and put the idea to paper. More often than not, you will realise that you will come up with content that can span multiple blog posts.
Once you have managed to get a blog written that you are pleased with, using a blog platform such as WordPress you can schedule your posts to go live at specific dates and times for optimal impact. You can also schedule the blog post to be sent to your social networks at certain times by utilising tools such as Hootsuite.
Starting a blog is analogous to pushing a stationary vehicle – the most difficult part is at the start. Once you have momentum, things become incrementally easier over time until it’s a breeze! Initially you will second guess yourself frequently and the key is to just publish content as a main priority without over-thinking the quality. Getting the ball rolling is the most important factor to think about at the start, quality comes with time.
Wrapping Up..
Blogging is still one of the best ways for businesses to put some personality into their content and engage readers in new ways where you can start to build a new trustworthy relationship with clients.
Trust is obviously an important thing to develop for any business and if you can continually produce useful and reliable content, it says a lot about you as a business giving people the added confidence when it comes to choosing you or a competitor. Customers would always rather choose a company that is clued up and well-versed in the industry, than competitors that remain quiet online and haven’t proven their worth by way of useful content.
Here at Opace, we help clients in a range of industries with their business blogging and content marketings strategies. Whether via training and consultancy, writing individual blog posts, or a fully managed digital marketing service we’ve helped countless clients over the years reach new customers and hope to help many more. For more information, please get in touch here.
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