How to use blogging as a top marketing tool

blogging

The power of a blog rich in content and links is undeniable. If you have a website and are yet to write and post blogs on it or you have a blog but you don’t feel as if you’re utilizing it then let us go through why and how blogging can make an enormous, positive difference for you and your business as of today.

Blogs are a way of sharing regular, up-to-date content with your existing and target audience. They give you an opportunity to create content which shows off what your company has been doing and promote the services you provide. The most successful blogs are compelling and normally part of a series, drawing their readers in consistently and encouraging them to share the posts with their own circles, thus achieving organic promotion and growth in traffic to the site.

The top read blog in the world right now is the Huffington Post. Let’s take a moment to examine why this is. The HP has a huge range of content on topics from world news to lifestyle, politics to comedy, tech to entertainment (the list goes on). This makes their blog attractive to a large audience as there is something which is of interest for such a variation of ages, professions, and locations.

Their posts feature information which are relevant for people from all over the world. Their content is international and ranks well across most of the world. This is, of course, because they have offices all over the world, but the idea that your content can be of interest to people from more than one specific place is what we must take away from this.

Sure, your company might be one which specialises providing products or services to people in your local area but the internet is global and so is your potential growth if you chose it to be so, why should your content only be targeted to a small field when it could be of benefit to people all over the world?

The Huffington Post’s articles link back to other posts they have published and they all feature a clear set of icons which provide links for their readers to share the content on whatever platform they want, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, email or a URL copy.

Look into how the Huffington Post has managed to make the most out of their content, we can see that blogs can grow to have an immense following if a few simple things are deployed.

  • Ensure your blogs cover a variety of different topics, that way you will increase your target audience and be likely to see an increase in traffic on your site
  • Get global. If you can make your content appeal to people from all over the world then you will get rid of any limits you had in terms of your followers and develop a following which increases every day
  • Make your links clear. Whether it’s linking from your blog to your site, to other blog posts or to your social media accounts then make your links obvious. Clear hyperlinks will be more effective in encouraging your readers to read on and to share your blogs with their own followers- thus growing your following even further.

Now we know how the most successful blog has come to achieve its title and what tips we can take from their site, let’s talk about how you can make your blog’s content stand out from your competitors.

Blogs will gain a following if they are useful to their readers. Whether it’s news, expertise, humour, insight or fun, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that when someone reads what you’ve written on your blog, they get something out of it, use an originality checker to ensure it is unique. It is that and that alone which will see them coming back to read your next post. If your content is helpful, they will also want to share it on their own social media accounts which, as we have addressed, will be of huge favour to you.

No matter what your company does, you can write and share posts which serve a purpose for your readers. It’s all about the topics you choose, the language you adopt and the way you sell your brand.

Sales pitches are best left for your website’s copy and advertisement. Your blogs should give your readers a much more pragmatic feeling.

The posts need to be long enough to provide substantial information but short enough to not be at risk of coming across boring to your readers. A good way of breaking up a longer blog post is to include bullet points or a different type of formatting which makes the content easier and more intriguing for your readers.

Try and include high quality pictures which relate to your content too. Include featured images so that people can get a quick visual aid as to what to expect from reading your blog.

If you’re not sure how to blog to help with your SEO then a few basic steps can see your blog content contribute to your search engine rankings rise. Including the keywords you are targeting on your site a couple of times in each blog post will assist your SEO but overloading each post with your keywords won’t.

Stick to one or two uses of your keyword per post as any more will risk Google pushing your rankings down for trying to inundate your site. Putting your keywords into the title, meta-description and in the URL of your post is a great way of including them without going overboard.

There are companies who specialise in writing blogs for SEO purposes. If this is something you want to find more about then be sure to ask for references from the companies you look at. Lexel is a leading SEO Agency. Top tips for finding a content writer for your site is from their previous clients and their testimonials. Never feel like you can’t ask for this, they are a crucial part of discovering how good the writer really is.

The final thing to bear in mind when writing blog posts or trying to grow your blog’s audience is that if your blog doesn’t look good on mobile then it will lose support. Traffic coming from mobiles and tablets are increasing year on year and that is not going to change. When planning and previewing your posts, make sure to test how they’ll look on different devices. Play around with the sizes of the images and the positioning of the text until you’re confident that your blog will be appealing for traffic from all sources.

What are your favourite blogs and why? What advice would you give your former self if you were starting your blog today?