When it comes to Inbound Marketing, blogging is a powerhouse of opportunity for your business. You get to decide how frequently you publish, what keywords you hone in on, where you'll publish it, how you'll market it and what your audience most wants to see. A well-done blog can absolutely draw visitors and turn those readers into leads.
Putting words in a draft and hitting "publish" won't be enough, however. Before your blog can bring you business, you need to back it with a solid blogging strategy. Here are five tips to get you started:
1. Articulate Your Purpose
When you're brainstorming content for your blog, everything is going to come back to your purpose for starting a blog in the first place. Write a statement encompassing why you're blogging, what it means to your audience and how it fits in with your company's overall marketing plan. If you give your blog a core purpose, you will have a unified place to make decisions from down the line.
2. Determine Your Ideal Client
The content you put on your blog will draw a certain audience to your website, so you want to keep that in mind when you're brainstorming content. Picture your ideal client, and create blog posts that would be helpful or interesting to them. What are their concerns and struggles? What are they looking to buy for themselves or their business? What are their main questions? Think about your clients' needs ahead of time, and you're likelier to attract the type of client you will work with the best.
If you want to get started quickly, take a look at your social media and frequently asked questions pages. These will tell you exactly what people in your industry (and specifically, people who interact with your business already) are looking for.
3. Check Out the Competition
Before launching your own blog strategy, take cues from your main competitors. First of all, see if they have a blog at all, and if so, check out the quality. If most of your competitors don't have a blog at all, you will have a leg up in putting out great content. If they do have a blog, see if it seems to be working for them. How often are they publishing? Is there something their content lacks that you could offer?
Check out keyword rankings, too. If a competitor is ranking higher than you for a specific search keyword, you can work that into your blog posts. Create some posts that you know will be favorable for those keywords, and you can gradually nudge your way up the search results.
4. Call to Action
Let's say you get to the point where you're publishing amazing blog content and traffic to your site is increasing. What do you want all those new visitors to do after reading your blog post?
Hopefully they're top notch potential clients. If they are, you don't want them to have to dig to get in touch with you. Make it very easy for them to send you a question or search your site. You can even take it one step further and offer a free ebook or infographic in exchange for their email address, allowing you to better capture your audience.
Whatever action you want a reader to take, be sure to make it as simple as possible for them to carry that out.
5. Create a Publishing Plan
Blogging may sound simple at first. Write, publish, repeat. But there's a lot more to it than that. Even publishing high quality content once a week can be a challenge, so set yourself up with a publishing plan. Hash out all the details beforehand, like who will contribute to your blog, how often you will put out a new post, where you will share your content once it's published and when you will meet with your team to brainstorm ideas.
Once the details are worked out, you will have a much better handle on how you're going to set your blog up for long-term success.
