Blogging is everywhere nowadays, and it seems like every business and individual under the sun is having a go. However, there is a method in the madness since blogging is one of the most effective ways to engage and interact with your users, attracting them to your small business to generate sales.
However, blogging can only be a beneficial as it is done right. Today, we’re going to explore several clever blogging tips for you to remember, allowing you to maximize the success of your blogs and take your online business to the next level.
Make it Relevant to Your Business
Firstly, perhaps the most important element of blogging you need to consider when writing is that the content you’re producing needs to be relevant to your small business.
While some topics may seem relevant, they need to ideally be directly related to the products or services that you’re offering, so the customer can make an easy connection. You have to show how they can benefit from buying and using your products and how it can resolve their problems.
Research Your Competitors
While you may feel bad about checking out your competitor’s content, after all, you wouldn’t want them doing it to you; it’s an essential part of business. How are you supposed to stay one step ahead if you don’t know where they are?
Not only can checking your competition give you ideas for content, but you can also check a tonne of elements, such as what their most popular posts are, how their users are interacting with their content and what sort of keywords they are using. Check it and make content better than your competitors with your ideas.
Focus on Your Target & Purpose
Every single blog post that you upload to your website needs to have a purpose. Without this purpose fresh in your mind for every post that you write, you won’t be able to lead customers in that direction, and the entire post will have been for nothing.
Some of the purposes you could think about include;
- Inspiration
- Product information
- Motivational
- Business story
- Customer case study
- Sign up for a mailing list
- Follow on social media
- Offer or promotional education
Your blog is one of the methods of conversation with your potential customers, so lead them to the buying process of your products or services.
Think About Formatting and Accuracy
When it comes to presenting your blog content, you need to make sure that you’re formatting your final piece in such a way that it’s as easy as possible for your reader to consume. As you can see from this article, imagine if there were no subheadings and no broken paragraphs, just one big block of text. Would you be happy to read it all?
One of the most important processes you need to undertake when you’re writing your blogs before you upload them is to check them to ensure they are free from errors and mistakes. If you’ve got spelling errors, misplaced punctuation and bad grammar, this will seriously harm the credibility and reputation of your blogs and people won’t want to read them.
According to study, 59% of people stated that they wouldn’t buy any product or service from the company who has grammar mistakes and errors on their website. Check and proofread your content using tools like Grammarix to be sure your content is perfect to go.
Make sure that you break up your content in small, digestible chunks for easy reading, especially when you consider a vast majority of your readers will be coming to your website through their mobile devices. You can also use tools like Cite It In to add any references, citations and quotes in a professional manner.
How Often Are You Going to Post?
The knack for running a successful blog is being able to post consistently. Ideally, you’ll want to be uploading a post about twice a week, but you can do once a week or even daily, depending on the nature of your small business.
However, any less than once a week and your customers will read a post and then forget about your business. You want to be posting consistently, so your customers always have you in their minds, but not too much that it annoys them by seeing you pop up on their feeds all the time.
Consider the Length of Your Content
It’s easy to want to talk on and on about the subject that you and your small business is interested in. Depending on your blogging platform, writing long-form content may be ideal and what your customers are interested in.
However, if you’re marketing to ‘everyday people’, this can cause problems since the typical person wants easily digestible content that only takes several minutes to read through maximum before they get bored and take their attention elsewhere.
Using tools like Easy Word Count, you can make sure the majority of your content reaches around 800 words, an ideal reading time of five minutes or so.
Always Check for Plagiarism
Plagiarism is one of blogging biggest taboo subjects, and you need to make sure that you’re avoiding it at all costs. While you might not be proactively going out onto the internet to copy other people’s work, it’s possible that you do it accidentally without even realizing which is why it’s so important you check each post.
Having plagiarised content on your blog will mean that Google indexes your page and then removes them from their search engine results pages, and they won’t even notify you. Fortunately, there are many online tools, like Copyscape and Academized that you can use to check your content to ensure it’s 100% original.
Consider Outsourcing
Since you’re trying to run and manage your small business, there may not always be time to write new blogs to the quality that you’re expecting. However, you still need to post. With this in mind, it’s worth remembering that there are many services out there that can help to generate content when you need it.
Sites like Upwork and Paper Fellows are full of writers that you can use to produce content on your behalf, whenever you need them too. Alternatively, if you want to write them yourself, you can use writing guide databases like State of Writing and Via Writing to help you create quick and properly formatted content.
Conclusion
As you can see, blogging is beneficial for your business and can help your potential customers to understand your product or service better. Be sure to use these main tips and you’ll lead your customers to buy from you and use your products to take your small business to the next level.
Author Bio:
Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs at Oxessays. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. You can visit her personal blog at Letsgoandlearn.com