Blogging Like a Pro
“Companies that blog weekly grow twice as fast as those that blog once per month. Companies that blog weekly or more grow an additional 50 percent faster.” ~ Hubspot
Unlike the contact us page on your website, your blog needs to be updated frequently. It is read by search engines so that they can refer traffic to your website and by customers who are looking for relevant content before making any purchase.
Blog brings more traffic to your website; the more blogs you create, more the chances of your business being found on the internet. Blog brings in good traffic to your website. Now, what is good traffic? People you are interested and people who are searching about your industry online. Your Blog also helps build trust with your audience.
Here a few tips for your blogging endeavor:
Customer Segmentation
According to Kotler, customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways relevant to marketing, such as age, gender, interests, spending habits and so on. For example, a school would most probably target married people or single parents in a certain age group.
Once you define your audience, you can go after them with laser focus.
Set Smart Goals
Once you’ve chosen the kind of audience you are interested in, decide what is the purpose of your blog? Is it to give awareness of your products or covert leads into buyers? This is imperative because if you want to sell, your posts will need strong call to actions. On the other hand, if you are trying to build brand awareness, you will just need to put valuable content on the web.
Create an Editorial Schedule
An editorial schedule will help define the type of content and frequency of content for your blog over a period of time. There are two kinds of content. The first one is ever green content, which is not time bound and remains relevant forever. A good example would be of a story which has instructions for bicep workout. The second kind of content is time bound and becomes irrelevant after a certain period of time. For example, a news story covering Justin Bieber’s car crash or ISIS conquering new territories is time bound and would become irrelevant after some time.
Stay consistent with the timings of your posts and post something different daily. For example, something funny on Thursday, Industry news on Monday and maybe reviews on Wednesday.
Share As Much As You Can
Use social media to promote your blog. Put social media icons on your blog to encourage people to share. Try running contests and quizzes to keep your audience engaged.
Encourage Guest Blogging
Guest blogging helps build industry linkages, adds credibility to your blog, and offers free advice to customers. Guest bloggers will also share their posts with their social contacts which will increase your blog reach.
On Frequency of Posts
It depends on your industry and the amount of free time you have. Consistency is more important than frequency. Two to five posts per week are essential for new blogs aiming for growth, states BloggingPro.
Developing a blog needs time and patience. So build a schedule and stick to it for a couple of months.
