Boost your marketing with blogging
What if there was a way to not only share your knowledge and expertise with your customers, position yourself as a leader in your industry and promote your goods and services, but also to help boost your search engine optimisation? Blogging can do all this and more!
These days, businesses have found that blogging can add a lot to their digital marketing strategy. The upside of having your website built on WordPress is that you have a blog built right into your site, ready for you to tap into the benefits of starting your own blog for online marketing.
The pros of blog marketing
The very nature of blogging makes them ideal for marketing since it is a way for consumers and businesses to interact by promoting your services to potential clients, as well as giving existing customers a reason to come back to your website. Here are a few other benefits:
1. Inexpensive to start and run. If you’re a client of AusWeb Design, your site is built on the WordPress content management system (CMS) which means you already have a blog built in to your website ready to go!
2. Easy to use. The WordPress blogging system is simple to use. If you can copy, paste, type, drag and drop and upload, you can have a professional looking blog.
3. Effective way to have new and returning traffic come to your site to see what’s new. Offering tips, updates and other new content gives people a reason to return to your business website, which gives them new opportunities to buy.
4. Improves search engine ranking. Google, in particular, likes to find and rank new content, and many entrepreneurs use blogging specifically for search engine optimisation (SEO).
5. Allows you to show off your expertise to gain trust and credibility with your market. People like to know who they’re doing business with. With a blog you can prove you’re an expert, provide helpful tips and other valuable information, all of which help consumers feel good about spending money on your product or service.
6. Connect with your market. Blogs can allow you to have a conversation with your market. This gives you the opportunity to build trust and rapport, as well as get feedback and provide customer service.
7. It can make money beyond your product or service. You can accept advertising, promote affiliate products and get sponsors, adding additional sources of revenue to your business.
Boost your SEO juice
The best way to help boost your ranking potential in Google by blogging is to start with your post categories. Post categories are great to not only organise your blog and help readers quickly locate the topics that interest them, but also helps Google categorise your content for better ranking.
Think about your main service areas or product categories, and create post categories based on these. For example, as a website design and marketing agency, some of our topics include ‘website design’, ‘marketing’ and ‘graphic design’.
If you are a fitness and nutrition business, perhaps you might want categories like ‘healthy eating’, ‘fitness tips’ and ‘recipes’. Or if you are an online store selling electronics, you can organise your posts by topics such as ‘computer hints’ and ‘gadgets’.
The benefit of this is that not only are your blog posts categorised according to relevant keywords for Google, the bonus is that if a site visitor is interested in that topic and the post links to your related service or product, you are directing them to realise that you can provide what they’re reading about.
Blog marketing action plan
Starting a blog to promote your business can be set up within minutes.
1. Make a blog marketing plan. What are you going to share on your blog? News, tips, resources, etc? Further, how often will you update your blog? Daily, weekly, etc?
2. Create your blog, and post categories. AusWeb Design can help you set up and style your blog on your website, and we have some helpful tips in our knowledgebase all about blogging in WordPress.
3. Fill your blog with several posts ASAP. Readers don’t like to visit a blog with only one or two posts. Add ten or more posts quickly, and then go to your regular post schedule. (Having trouble finding time to write your posts? Our copywriters can help! )
4. Market your blog. It’s very easy to integrate social media into your blog, so that your blog posts go out to your followers. Include your blog on your marketing materials as well.
5. Cross-promote with email marketing. Use your blog to encourage email signups . This is another great way to keep people who are interested in your business coming back to your blog, which again, gives them more opportunity to spend money with you.
