Blogging has always been an excellent tool for any entrepreneur or company to help elevate and grow their eCommerce to the next level. Unfortunately, too many are overlooking the benefits of having a blog as part of their business plan.
With a blog, you can see tremendous improvement towards your business’ performance as a blog will help rank you site higher in search engine sites and gain more traffic, compared to those without. In addition to that, a blog is a great tool to expand your customer base and improve your sales, so it definitely better to create a blog as soon as possible.
Of course, the biggest reason why companies and businesses have not been using a blog is because they’re not too sure how to do it. You’re in luck, because we have some tip that you can immediately use to make blogging grow your online business.
Using SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
One of the obvious advantages of having a blog is direct and create traffic for your website using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. If you’re familiar with SEO, it’s basically crafting your content in a way that ranks and gets indexed easily on search engine sites such as Google.
And getting on Google’s good side is a definitely an advantage you’d want.
Generally, there a number of ways that you can use to make your blogs and content SEO friendly. Some of them would be to create headlines that match well with SEO, improving the speed of your blog by reducing image sizes or by designing your site with proper navigation and site structure using proper templates.
When it comes to blogging, however, the following ways should be enough to improve your site’s search engine ranking:
- Using the proper amount of keywords or phrases in your content that’s relevant to your market
- Having other authoritative sites that link back (backlinking) to your website and content for topics that are related to your products or services.
- Updating your blog frequently will make search engine bots crawl and index your site more frequently.
- Using long-tail keywords or specific, niched phrases that meant to target and capture traffic people who want a specific type of goods or services.
If SEO seems to be a bit way over your head, companies such Ucraft offers their own SEO app which you can use to help improve your site’s SEO overall, not just your blog content.
Be an Authoritative Voice
A blog can used to establish your company and brand as an authoritative voice and leader to your audience and market industry.
Whether you’re a fitness trainer or a cupcake decorator, establishing yourself as an industry leader means that everybody will think of your company or brand first when they want that specific product or service.
Sites such as Good Financial Cents found success when its founder and financial advisor, Jeff Rose, started a blog that allows him to market his expertise and thought leadership. Rose managed to attract the attention of big sites such as Forbes and Entrepreneur which further cement his status as an industry expert, which boosted his business.
Create that trust among your customers. Start writing articles that give useful insights about your targeted market and you’ll see your readership improve by leaps and bounds, which ultimately will improve your business.
Explore Social Channels
The advent of social means a new platform for you to promote your brand and business. While you can use social media as a way to promote your blog and its content, it can also be used as a form of blogging itself.
Influencers and key social media figures have already started using these social media platforms as another form of blogging. Some of them include:
- Using Twitter to Microblog
- Using YouTube to do vlogs
- Using Instagram for photoblogs
If you’re not using any of the social media platforms, then you’re missing out on a huge customer base. It’s definitely recommended that you have a social media strategy in place as its a platform where potential customers are consuming content.
eCommerce consultant agency, MW2 Consulting, is a perfect example of using social media to build up their brand. They regularly use Twitter to highlight unique and interesting facts about their company and their new additions.
Another great use of social media is to initiate a conversation between your brand and its customers. Engaging in active “social listening” and asking for feedback from your customers shows how important customer experience is to your brand. This lead to loyalty among your current users and builds up your brand quality.
Extract Analytics
With a blog, you have another avenue for extracting data that can be useful for your business. You should analyze the traffic patterns and your popular blog content to what resonates with your audience and customers.
This also helps you avoid choosing topics on random, as you figure out and zero in on topics that your audiences are interested in. Sure, you should still keep talking about your true area of expertise; however, you should try and experiment with your content to see what works with your target customer.
Using analytics from your website, you can create popular content that will ultimately drive traffic to your website. Julia Nickerson of Savory Tooth understood the importance of creating content that’s popular with her audience, which lead to her blog getting over 500,000 views a month, after having her blog up for only a year.
Go through your blog’s traffic history and look at what content is popular with your readers and create more content around it.
Manage Your Blog Marketing
With all the suggestion we’ve listed above, you’re probably overwhelmed with how much work needs to be done. Well, worry not, because there are a number of tools that you can use to help automate your blogging strategy.
These tools are useful for creating and managing your content calendar and even help distribute it to a variety of social media platforms. Depending on your budget, some of these apps can be either paid or free and are capable of handling small and huge scale tasks.
Some of the tools you should check out are:
- HootSuite
- Meet Edgar
- Dlvrit
- Co-Schedule
Wrap Up
Having a blog can be a great asset to your business and creating one doesn’t have to be a painful or complicated process. Focus on a few that you can manage and once you’ve get the hang of it, move on the next tip to improve your business, such as finding the best website hosting for your small business.