So you started a business blog. If you start blogging, you will attract more of the type of leads you want.
I stand by that statement 100%.
There’s probably a reason you haven’t seen an increase in traffic or leads if you’ve started a blog. You need to have a strong foundation and clear strategy before you start a business blog, so that your content will be effective and achieve the results you want.
1. Don’t Talk About Yourself
Let me be very clear here. Your blog should not be a series of posts that only highlight your company’s successes. bragging won’t get you anywhere.
The blog for your company should provide value for potential readers, and not just be a platform to talk about how great your products, services, customer service, or company is.
If you only talk about yourself, you’re not solving your customers’ problems. This means that you will not see an increase in traffic or leads.
The aim of business blogging is to give your potential customers and visitors the information they need to make a informed buying decision.
2. Do Answer Your Customer’s Questions
Here’s an example. If you’re trying to eat healthier but you’re busy, you might not have time to think about shopping, finding recipes, and more.
If you’re interested in trying out a meal delivery service like HelloFresh or BlueApron, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of what these services are, how they work, and what you can expect from them.
If you are new to delivered meal services, you will most likely do some research before using one. You might wonder:
- What meal service is the cheapest?
- What meal service is the healthiest?
- What meal service is the fastest?
- What meal service is the most customizable?
- What meal service has the best reviews?
After looking around online for a while, you will find some content that answers your questions. Once you have found one or two options that sound the best, you can narrow your search down. Then, you’ll read the reviews for each, and search queries like:
- HelloFresh vs. Blue Apron
- Sun Basket vs. HelloFresh
- Daily Harvest vs. HungryRoot
After you have gathered all of the necessary information, you will use it to make a decision to purchase. And that, my friends, is how content marketing works.
The way your customers search for your product or service is no different than how we just decided on the best meal service for us.
We looked at all of the available options, considered our needs, and narrowed it down to the best option. You will be able to reach more potential customers by writing a business blog that addresses the questions they are asking.
If you’re a manufacturer of something that you don’t think is exciting, business blogging will work in the same way as the HelloFresh exercise we just did.
Someone buying an air compressor wants to know:
- What are the best air compressors on the market?
- What air compressors are the most cost-effective?
- How much service will each type of air compressor need?
- Is there someone in my area who can service my air compressor?
If you want a high SERP ranking, answer questions with a well-developed blog. This will bring in more of the leads you’re looking for.
3. Do Pick Keywords You Care About
If you want your business blog to rank highly, you should select your keywords carefully. The better your ranking is, the more people will see your site. And more people looking at your site increases your chances of getting and keeping customers.
But, how to pick keywords you care about?
When writing a business blog, you should target keywords that have a high search volume and low competition.
These keywords are the low hanging fruit. Many people are looking for the aforementioned information, but few companies are providing it. True. Virtually anything can be a keyword.
Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO. The challenge, however, is not just choosing high-volume keywords, but also making sure they’re relevant to your company.
I’ll use an extreme (fake) example to illustrate. If you want to rank for the long-tail key phrase “how to peel an orange”, you will have amazing search volume and almost no competition.
You could write a blog about how to peel oranges, but it probably wouldn’t rank well and wouldn’t be useful to you. You should focus on ranking for keywords that are relevant to your product or service.
The traffic you are driving to your website will never convert. Instead of choosing keywords that are general and not relevant to your business, choose keywords that are relevant to your business, your industry, your products, and your services.
4. Do Read Competing Blogs
If you have picked out a keyword that you like, go ahead and enter it into your favorite search engine. Who is ranking at the top? What does their content look like?
What do they do well? What key points are they missing? Have they optimized their blog as best possible?
To write blogs that will rank highly in search engine results, you will need to create content that is better than what is already ranking first. In order to improve your skills, you need to be aware of what your competition is doing.
Reading Top-Performing Blogs also Helps Confirm Search Intent
Reading other blogs in your niche can help you verify that the keywords you’ve selected are being used with the intent you’re hoping for. Make sure the results from your search engine support the information you want to include in your blog.
The word “keyword” here refers to the word ” breakup.” Just looking at that word—with no context—you might think it’s about writing an email that breaks up with a romantic partner. The keyword is associated with an email that is sent to a prospect after they have stopped responding to sales attempts.
I didn’t know what the search intent was until I looked it up myself.
It’s important to match a query’s search intent in order to rank highly on search engines. When choosing a keyword for your blog, make sure that it is relevant to the content of your blog. If it is not, your blog will not be successful in attracting the right kind of traffic.
Competing blogs can give you ideas about what to write and help you improve your blog.
5. Don’t Write for Length
Now that you’ve chosen a keyword and researched your competition to see how you can beat them, it’s time to write the actual blog posts. The topic of blog length is a controversial one among those in the SEO industry.
If you’re writing a guide on how to market your construction company, you’ll need more than 500 words to deliver on what your title is promising.
Business blogging is about writing about one topic in great detail. A different tactic to writing your business blog would be to focus on a certain number of words instead of writing according to a set word count.
How to Write Comprehensive Business Blogs Without Getting Hung Up on Word Count
- Choose your topic — “How to Carve a Pumpkin”
- Make a list of all of the questions someone might ask when they’re getting ready to carve a pumpkin and the steps that go into the process:
- What pumpkin is best to carve?
- How do I prep the pumpkin for carving?
- How to scoop out the pumpkin
- Choosing a design for your pumpkin
- Carving your pumpkin’s design
- How to make your carved pumpkin last
- Cut out any steps that might not be relevant to the question you’ve set out to answer.
- While those might be related to your original question, they’re not exactly relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve — don’t make your job harder than it has to be!
- Now that you’ve decided what’s relevant and what’s not, each of those questions and steps you kept become H2s and H3s in your blog.
- You’re done writing when you’ve finished writing each of those sections — not when you hit a certain word count.
It is important that your blog posts are comprehensive and cover the topic you are focusing on with helpful content.
6. Stop Spreading Sales Messages
Who is your blog for? Is it for your company or for your readers?
Your goal for blogging may be to generate leads, increase web traffic, or to raise your profile as an authority. If you only use your blog to post ads and sales messages, you may have a hard time finding readers.
You might not win the clients you’re looking for. Your blog may not get much attention and be like a voice whispering quietly.
Most people aren’t interested in your sales messages. Most people aren’t even interested in your business. They want to know what’s in it for them.
If you want to gain business with your blog, you should think like your reader’s mentor, not a salesman. A salesman wonders how to get his next sale. A mentor cares about his students. His goal is to help them succeed and have a more satisfying life.
If you give advice that is reliable, you will be seen as an expert and people will be more likely to trust you. This is how you can gain new customers. To start wooing customers with your blog, answer these two critical questions:
- Who are you writing for? Try to be specific. When you can visualize an ideal reader or buyer persona, your writing becomes more vivid, more personal, and more engaging.
- How can you help your readers? Consider what your ideal reader is dreaming of, and how you can help him achieve his goals.
Focus on how you can help your readers rather than on promoting your company in your next blog post. If you want to sell more products, you should stop trying to pitch them on your blog and instead focus on providing valuable content.
7. Get Rid of a Corporate Tone
Nobody chats with a robot. Nobody bonds with a call center menu. Nobody gossips with a corporation.
To engage your readers, make your writing more conversational. Do you notice how I put questions throughout this blog post? The reason I use the word “you” is because I want these questions to address you directly.
That’s how I try to engage you. A blog post should be a conversation and not a monologue. Good conversationalists use questions as a way to keep the conversation going.
You may believe that you need to record yourself speaking and then transcribe the text in order to write conversationally. However, have you come across a full recording of an interview before?
This text is rife with vague language, incorrect grammar, and unfulfilled sentences. When you are writing conversationally, it does not mean that you write exactly as you would speak.
You make it sound like talking Instead of editing your text to make it sound like writing, make it sound like conversation.
This is how you get rid of a dull corporate tone:
- Scrap gobbledygook like cutting-edge, world-class, and customer service excellence. You don’t really use those words when you talk, do you?
- Slaughter the passive voice. Rather than write Your email will be answered (passive), write: We’ll answer your email within 24 hours (active).
- Kill long paragraphs and dense blocks of text. To enter a conversation you need to give your reader time to breathe – that’s what white space is for.
- Use contractions like they’ll, he’s, and we’re, because they’re more informal.
The way you speaking to your reader makes them feel like you’re talking with them instead of talking at them. You are keeping him interested in the conversation, and making it more likely that he will take further action such as leaving a comment, sending you an email, or making a purchase.
8. Compose Deliciously Seductive Headlines
Do your blog posts receive the attention they deserve? Are your headlines so effective that people feel compelled to click through and read your posts?
A lipsmackingly good headline fulfils two crucial requirements:
- Attract attention by using sensory or emotional words. Numbers also work well in headlines because they stop wandering eyes in social media streams.
- Make a reader curious enough to click through by promising a specific benefit when reading the post.
In this post, you will learn how to write blog posts that will help you win customers.
Your headlines need to be seductive in order to gain more readers and customers. Make sure you spend time practicing your headlines, and take a look at the headlines of popular blogs to see what kinds of things tend to work well.
9. Create Enticing Opening Paragraphs
We live in a distracted world.
Each piece of content is battling for reader attention. Emails pop up. Twitter streams and Facebook updates distract your readers. You will need to work hard in order to get and keep people’s attention.
If you want your reader to keep reading, you need to write an opening paragraph that’s irresistible. Follow this simple 3-step formula:
- Empathize with your reader and tell him he’s not the only one struggling with a specific problem.
- Promise your reader your advice will make his life better.
- Reassure your reader that your tips are easy—everyone loves shortcuts, simple tricks, and straightforward formulas.
I understand your doubts about blogging, but if you follow these six simple rules, your blog can generate an endless stream of leads and customers.
Conclusion
Writing a business blog is hard work. Damn hard work. You need to know your stuff. You need to polish your writing skills. You need to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your readers and potential clients in order to understand what they want.
Great things will happen when you truly care about your readers. Understand what they’re trying to achieve. Know what they’re struggling with. Understand exactly how your advice can help them.
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