Perpetual Question of Modern Businesses: Do You Blog?

It is almost astonishing that some business owners and think tanks still ask this sort of question in the modern day and age of digital transformation of businesses -- but the truth is that you will hear this query more often than you suppose. Blogging or content marketing has become a notion that substituted the exercising of print banners, flyers, and pamphlets. If you are running any sort of business relying on communication, and you don’t exploit the interactive content, all possibilities are that you will be closing up your client work very soon.

Online Brands

On the other end, there are brands that are completely online since the time they’ve learned to read. A couple of them initiated using the online gamification even before that. Really a good move and it worked for them!

Content

Remember, it’s an era of IoT (Internet of Things), business apps, and cloud infrastructure but information (Content) is still, and will always be, the ruler. This is why, not only, gigantic brands like MakeMyTrip (one of the top travel websites), Godaddy (largest domain name registrar), and MOZ (a software company) host a blog segment, but local businesses like Stacey K Cleaning (a Michigan cleaning business) and MI Designz (a local web design agency), also try to embrace sharing regular business updates and audience awareness campaign through blogging.

So now, you are thinking of starting a business blog or speeding up the writing work. Right?

Well, you could do a shoddier move than pop over to read Neil Patel’s post on what to think about before you start.  He gives a fair insight into the consideration of blogging niche, domain, hosting, and the platform that you need to choose to come up with the brand new corporate blog.

I’m a great fan of Zac Johnson’s blogging skills and in one of his posts at Blogging.org, he advocates the use of SITE123 website and blog builder tool. Why?

Tools

1) It’s freely available and premium plans are also very affordable.

2) You can do it yourself, so doesn’t matter if you do not have coding/HTML skills.

3) Of course, it is mobile-friendly, and you can choose the design from a variety of website templates.

4) Free Hosting and Encryption

5) Not a constraint over the number of web pages

6) Facilitate vanity email IDs

7) Supports multilingual functionality

Back to Basics

Blogging can often be hyped up to deliver instant gratification and results for your business. This is a complete misconception and one that needs to be understood by those who are going to introduce blogging as a marketing tool for their business.

So here are a few words of wisdom that I hear from all of my blogger and marketing friends:

Google doesn’t want to rank me. Everybody says so but this will take some time. The quality of information you’re putting up, usability on the Blog, and activity needs to be contextually qualitative enough for search bots to spot and rank you. The more (considering quality) you post, the greater chances that Google rank you higher. But it does take a lot of time, so be patient.

Google’s algorithm is smart. Can SEO save me? SEO is not dead, but yes, algorithms today are very intelligent and your bad content policies and linking strategies can easily be caught. Usability and Content are the only fundamental SEO principles to drive massive organic traffic to your blog. Some funky plugins will make your optimization work a lot easier along the way.

But, I don’t have readers. At the time of launch, it is pretty usual. It might take months or sometimes years to build up your authority and so thus, your readership. Just focus on quality and post strategically and you’ll secure your readers. Social media gives small business owners the perfect opportunity to take advantage of their size. Being small means more personality and potentially stronger connections with users so use that to your advantage.

I would appreciate user comments. If you’re not hooking up comments promptly, don’t give up. People can read and absorb and not feel the need to comment. It doesn’t mean they love your content any less! Make sure you keep a balance over sales messages (secondary thing) and real content (primary thing). It’s more favorable to not just adapting push marketing but designing engaging assets to attract new readers from social media and search engines.

Keywords? Lucky you if your writing category is a very specific niche based; this way, it will be comparatively easy to rank for desired set of keywords. But, if you are writing about very generic subjects like freelancing, blogging, and Internet, you need to do a bit of research about keywords that were not frequently used in other blogs but are still commonly searched.

Everyone wants to be number one in the Google rankings for the top keywords in their industry.  Sure that would be great, but probably not a realistic goal, especially if you want some quick successes.

Do you want to know a better tactic… that works? Target keywords that bring you the business, not just visitors!

I think, my writing work is not good. Says who exactly? Every person has a different style and tone. Find using your unique voice and don’t make it contrived (people will see straight through it!). If people don’t appreciate how do you blog, sure they won’t return. But there will be plenty out there that will enjoy it – don’t worry about it. You can’t please everyone so don’t try to!

What about Email Marketing? Really a good move! Neil Patel, Brain Dean and Ali Salman are a couple of guys who use it as a weapon for their traffic + ROI success.

When you start a business blog, you want to push your brand as much as possible, but advertising and public relations all cost big money. A branded email address can act as a low-cost PR tool; every time you email anyone they are exposed to your brand, making it more likely to remember your company’s name.

Conclusion

Successful bloggers continually adapt the content and deliver the message by maintaining their unique tone which is personable in nature. It’s a bit of journey which asks for considerable efforts. The biggest message for beginners though is that it takes time and patience to build up your blog.