Blogging is an important digital marketing activity that every business must do. It might have different meanings and intentions for different businesses, but it always offers a business create a unique identity. In this article, we will give you a step by step procedure to set up, run, and market a business blog.
Choose the platform: The platform to host your blog is an important pillar for your blogging success. WordPress or Drupal would be a good choice, when you are looking for more traffic and search engine attention for your business blog.
Decide the goal: Decide the goal that you want to achieve from blogging. It could be traffic, SEO, branding, or lead generation. Think about your business first to decide the blogging goal. It may change with situation.
Identify your readers: The next step is, identify the people who you want to see your blog posts. These are the people, who would take the desired action to attain your blogging goal. You need to analyze their likes, dislikes and what they look for online before creating posts on your blog.
Select the content layers: Once you know the proper reader persona for your blog, you need to start thinking of ideas for your posts. Make an extensive list of subject areas that could be covered in the blog. For example, if you belong to restaurant industry, you need to think of different ideas to promote your brick and mortar business through the blog.
Fix the frequency: It’s recommended to publish at least 4 blog posts a week, as a HubSpot study showed that businesses that post 16+ posts per month in their blog, get at least 4.5X more leads, compared to the businesses that post less.
But whatever frequency you decide, you need to be consistent with it. If you feel you can post 2 posts a week without hampering any other marketing activities, stick to that.
Create a content calendar: Keep the content layers and decided posting frequency in mind to create a content calendar. Create at least two weeks’ calendar, so you have enough time to edit, review with images, and publish on time.
Choose the main keywords: You need to search for the related keywords before writing a blog post. Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows you to analyze your keywords seamlessly. Include the keywords in your posts to ensure that they get indexed by search engines easily.
Make it shareable: Social media optimization for blog is an essential step to increase the shareability factor for your blogs. Make sure you have all the social sharing buttons installed on your blog as well as on the individual posts. A recent Unbounce study showed that floating sidebar social sharing buttons are more effective to increase sharing by 52%.
Apart from that, images play a key role to increase social sharing. Be sure to create compelling images that redirect more and more shares.
Create a distribution plan: Once you hit the ‘Publish’ button, your actual marketing job starts. Build a complete plan of action to distribute your blog posts. It includes social networks, forums, groups and communities etc. Along with that, also make sure you optimize the post for each channel.
Promote them: Blog promotion could be either organic or paid. When you are paying to market your blog posts, you need to make sure that the targeting and budget is right. Moreover, there must be a goal that you want to achieve through paid marketing. Be clear about it.
Track the metrics: Once a month, sit with your team to analyze the performance of your blogging efforts. Track the right metrics and see if it’s close to the decided one to attain your blogging goal.
If you want to build a professional blog for your business, these guide will surely help you. However, if you feel that some of your queries are still unanswered, use the comment section below to reach out to us.
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