How do you not only blog but also blog in such a way that traffic and leads are forthcoming?
You can’t just blog without having a plan, can you? Well, it’s time to learn how to blog effectively for business.
And since you understand the benefits of business blogging, you need to know how to plan, launch, and grow a profitable blog that knocks it out of the park.
Here is how:
1. Undertake content mapping
I know you have heard this term several times. But what’s content mapping?
Any inbound content marketing strategy requires a plan, a roadmap that shows you where you are going.
Since the whole intent of developing a content marketing plan is to attract the customer into your sales funnel process, you need then to understand your customer journey.
You can understand the customer journey quite easily by creating a buyer persona, which is a representation of your ideal customer and their journey when they are exposed to your business operational environment.
The customer journey has several stages, such as the awareness stage, the consideration stage, the decision, and the delighting stage. You need to map all this in your content map.
Inbound content marketing is customer-centric. You will need to place your customer’s needs at the center of all your marketing efforts.
Hence, content mapping is the first step toward an active business blogging journey.
2. Have a blogging strategy
Any successful process needs a strategy. Since you already have a content map, the next step is to document your blogging strategy.
You will tarmac along the way if you don’t have a strategy in place. That’s not the right jump off the cliff. I know how daunting it is to start without one.
You see, a strategy helps to make you consistent. It shows you the following:
- Which topics to handle
- Who will handle which topic
- The keywords to target
- The date to publish and promote
With all these in place, you can achieve your blogging goals faster than jumping the gun. It’s not a nerve-wracking task to come up with one. Check this one out below. I’m using the one currently.
As you can see, it has the essential elements for developing and promoting valuable and relevant content to my mapped audience.
3. Create and promote content
With a strategy in place, you need to execute it.
Have a content creation team in place if you can’t create all the blog content yourself. Set aside about $1,000 for content creation since you will need a team of content writers to develop content regularly.
Your blog posts need to be search engine optimized, employ conversational content marketing, and be adequately structured for easy readability.
Use images in your posts because search engines favor blog posts with images. In fact, images attract 90% more views.
Plus, it also adds to the beauty of your post. Hence, it’s easy for your readers to understand. Ensure you optimize your images for search engines as well.
Promote your blog via social channels, YouTube, and bookmarking sites. The best social media channel to leverage is LinkedIn because it’s primarily for professionals. Therefore, it’s recommended for B2B blog content.
4. Leverage on analytics
There is no defined formula to rank your blog content because the algorithm is continually changing. No matter what SEO gurus tell, no one has gotten it all right.
However, if you keep checking the performance of your blog posts via Google Analytics, you will understand what’s working and what’s not.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool if you want to optimize your blog content for better performance.
You can know if your content is valuable to your audience with the bounce rate. If it’s high, you need to offer more value. A low bounce rate signifies that most readers stay for a significant amount of time on your site.
You will also know the amount of organic traffic you are getting plus one from social media. Organic traffic is always better because it converts easily. It also shows that your content is performing well.
Therefore, you need a Google Analytics account for effective and profitable blogging.
Conclusion
Business blogging is an effective inbound content marketing practice. It builds and strengthens customer relationships, enables a business to achieve business authority fast, boosts leads, sales, and ultimately leads to business growth.
Nevertheless, how do you do it effectively and avoid mistakes most businesses make when it comes to blogging?
The key is developing customer-centric content, optimizing for search, and promoting your blog to the right audience.
Do you have a business blog? Create one today and begin tapping into all the benefits that come with powerful business blogging.