Creating a blog for your business is the best thing that can happen to your business. Do you know that over 60% of businesses have blogs?.
There are many benefits you derive from using a blog to promote your business:
You get more eyes on your product and services as people use the search engines to find your product.
According to searchengineland, Google processes 2 trillion searches per year worldwide. If you create a search engine optimized content on your blog, you can get most of those visitors to your website to see your products and services.
You will not only get people to visit your product or service website, but also convert them into leads and paying customers. According to Research Now nearly nine in 10 consumers (84%) make purchases after reading about a product or service on a blog.
It is also a fact that 60% of U.S. online consumers say they have made purchases as a result of reading a blogger’s recommendation.
With the benefits enumerated above, I am sure you are ready to use a blog to promote your business.
Creating a blog is super easy, but promoting it is difficult. When you set up your business blog and create useful content for your audience, but do not promote it, something terrible happens…
P.T. Barnum said “Without promotion, something terrible happens… nothing!
That is correct!.
You get absolutely nothing.
Now, there are five major ways you can use a blog to promote your business and they are enumerated below:
- Create an exceptional content
One blogging mistake that most business blogs make is by writing posts that talks about their products and services. It is not that you should not inform your customers about what you do, but it must not constitute 100% of your content. You need to create content that is useful for your audience than anything else.
Your content must give actionable advice to help your audience to solve their problems. You must back up your advice with relevant examples to help your audience see what you are talking about and how to do it by themselves.
This is exactly what Neil Patel is doing on his blog. He creates actionable content that teaches his audience how to do marketing the right way. He does it by showing examples of what he teaches so that readers can do likewise.
Comprehensive or long form content attracts shares. According to SerpIQ, long form blog post ranked high in search engine results than short blog posts
This means as you create long-form content, your post can rank high on search engines driving more visitors to your business website.
All content types generate traffic, but there are three basic types of blog posts that generate more traffic shares and ranks high in search results. They are- List, How-to, and question posts. These are the type of blog posts that will drive more traffic to your blog.
Buzzsumo and Moz teamed up together to analyze the shares and links to over 1m article. In the research, they discovered that people love sharing list posts, how-to articles and question posts as shown in the pic below:
Therefore, create more of the post to generate more traffic or customer to your business website.
Lastly, include a call to action at the end of your blog posts. This will tell your readers what to do. Most people don’t take action after reading a blog post because they don’t know what to do. So, you tell them what to do and when to do it while they are reading your post or immediately after.
This is especially good if you are writing a list post to teach your audience how to carry out a task. For example, in a blog post titled “how to write a digital marketing plan in 2016“, in step 2, the writer encourage readers to take action by writing down their findings on their competitors.
The sentence highlighted above explicitly tells the reader to take action. As your readers go through the remaining content, it makes it easy for them to take other actions.
You can also do this in the conclusion part of your blog post just like Neil did in this post.
- Promote your blog post to your email subscribers
The content is sitting comfortably in your business blog now. The next thing to do is to send it to your email list. Email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than the social media networks.
Below is a comparison chart of different internet marketing methods.
You can see from the chart above that email marketing has the highest percentage.
Email marketing have an average ROI of $38 which means for every dollar spent, you get at least $38 in return. Isn’t that great?
So, how do you build a viable email list?
In addition to your regular autoresponder (Getresponse, Aweber, and Mailchimp), you will still need the help of other services to create eye-popping boxes that can grab readers attention and compel them to give you their email addresses. Such tools include SumoMe, Optinmonster, Leadpages, Hellobar etc.
When sending your email to your subscribers, make sure that you do it at the right time. This will ensure you get the best opens and click-throughs.
According to Mailchimp’s research, the best days of the week to send emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays. Although, other days are equally good except for the weekend. The best time to send an email is 10.am. in your time zone.
Ensure you add social share links to your email to make it easy for your readers to share your post directly from their inbox. Share link generator is a great tool you can use for this purpose. It is easy to use.
Simply type in the message you want to share, for example, you can type “click here to tweet” inside the twitter box and click to generate the link and add it to your email message.
Simple!
In addition to that, you can also include links to your blog post in your email signature. A good tool you can use to achieve this is Wisestamp. Enter in your content information, logo or picture and your blog’s RSS feed. Copy the code from there and add it to your email signature.
3. Use the social media to promote your blog
A lot of businesses are promoting their blog on social media networks. According to the latest research by smartinsights.com, there are 2.307 billion active social media users worldwide. Out of that, Twitter has 100 million daily active users, Facebook has 968 million daily active users.
From the statistics above, it can be seen that social media is a force to reckon with, if you want to get more customers to your business blog.
When you finish creating your blog post, the next thing you should do is to share it on the social media platform of your choice. The more likes, shares and retweets your post get, the more credibility it receives.
You can share your post more than once to get a larger number of people to view it. According to Coshedule.com, sharing your post more than once can increase your traffic by 3,150%.
Most people only share the headline of their content. You can do better than that. You can share your post subheadings and craft them into useful messages. You can add click to tweet link on your wordpress blog. This will make it easy for readers to quickly tweet any sentence from your posts.
If you include quotes from influencers in your industry, you can also share it on your social media pages. Tag the influencer to let them know you share their quotes. This can lead to resharing of your quotes or content to their own audience.
One major key to a successful social media promotion is the use of images. Including images in your post will boost the clickthrough rate by 150%.
- Use community, forums to promote your blog
There are several communities where you can promote your blog based on your niche. The communities allow you to share your content and other people’s content in your niche. Members of the community can now vote for your content to indicate whether it is good or bad. Such communities include Reddit, Quora, Bizsugar, Boxnutt, Producthunt, Triberr, inbound.org, growthhackers etc.
The internet is filled with different forums in different niches. Forums are where people go to get help. This is because there are lots of expert advice and answers there.
A forum provides a great platform for you to connect directly with your target audience, share your blog and get a link back to your business website.
You can find a forum in your niche by simply typing “intitle: forum” + [your niche keyword] into Google.
For example, when I typed “intitle: forum” + [dog food] into Google, I got the following results.
- Translate your business blog into different languages
It will interest you to know that not all websites are in English. According to W3Techs, there are top 10 Languages used on websites and they are: Russian, French, German, Chinese, Polish, Italian, Japanese, English, Spanish and Portuguese.
One common thing among successful businesses online is that they translate their website/blog into different languages. For example, check out Apple’s website below:
Translating your business blog into different languages will enable you to reach out to a different audience entirely. For example, by translating your website into Spanish, you will be able to reach out to about 37 million Spanish speakers in the United States.
Translating your business blog to French will enable you to reach a new audience in Canada and other French-speaking countries around the world.
When you translate your business blog into different languages, it will improve your search engine traffic.
Neil Patel increased his blog traffic by 47% by translating his blog into 82 languages using Transposh (a free WordPresss plugin)
When you translate your blog into different languages, it gives you a leverage over your competitors who might not be using this tactic.
Conclusion
Although, using a blog to promote your business is not an easy task, but the outcome is worth the effort.
It is easy if you the five points above i.e. create an exceptional content, use your email subscribers, use the social media networks, use forums and community and translate your website into different languages.
What other ways can you use a blog to promote your business?
