How to Create a Business Blog That Woos Readers and Wins Clients | DIYMarketers

According to HubSpot, 53 percent of marketers identified blogging as their top content marketing priority.

Another study by Social Media Examiner revealed that 65 percent of marketers planned to increase the use of blogging in 2017. Do you know why? In today’s highly competitive markets, blogging allows your business to build brand awareness effectively by providing relevant content to your target audience.

Apart from engaging your audience, well-written blogs help drive traffic to your website and convert the web visitors into leads. The image below shows how your business blog can help attract visitors that can then be turned into leads through fill out forms.

The bad news is that not every visitor will read through your blog and convert into a client. However, here are a few blog optimization tips that can help enchant your readers, and win business.

shows that the actual words you use make up just 7 percent of your communication, while the tone of voice contributes to around 38 percent. The objective of your business blog might be to engage readers, and convert them into customers, but if your content is salesy, it might turn away your readers altogether.

This is because your prospects are not interested in your sales pitch, but they are seeking relevant information. Thus, it is important to ensure that your blog talks to your audience in a way, which stimulates interest rather than firing sales messages at them.

Not sure how to make your blog’s content less salesy to entice your readers? Here’s what you need to do:

• Present yourself as a subject-matter expert so that you can provide valuable insights to your prospects.
• Focus on the needs of your prospects instead of your company and products for making your messages customer relevant.
• Include the product benefits in your content rather than functionality for building customer interest.

The business tycoon, Bill Gates, once said, “Content is king.” However, in the current information age, for staying on top of consumers’ minds, businesses need to follow this mantra, “New and updated content is king.”

We’ve often heard that consistency is one of the key success factors for any blog. Posting content regularly keeps your audience updated regarding what’s happening in the industry, and your business, such as new product updates or feature additions. Moreover, posting fresh content regularly will help in building a loyal subscriber base that can be converted into customers, over time.

Other than this, more content implies more keywords, thus increased reach. This is because by posting content frequently, you are optimizing your blog with more high-volume keywords, increasing your content’s share on search engine results.

Nonetheless, if you’re still unable to update your business blog regularly, is how you can update your old blog content and repurpose it usefully.

According to Bright Edge, 67 percent of online experiences begin with a search engine. As a result, to increase your blog’s traffic, and improve the conversion rate, you need to optimize your blog posts for SEO. Wondering how? Below are a few tricks that can improve your SEO rankings significantly.

• Conduct thorough keyword research to discover the topics that your audience is interested in.
• Ensure effective blog titles as they encourage people to click on your content as it appears in search results.
• Leverage internal linking for easier navigation, improved user experience and establishing information hierarchy.
• To enhance engagement, add visual content to your blog posts.
• Make sure that your blog posts are mobile-friendly to avoid high bounce rates.

However, if you want your blog to rank among the top search results in a short span of time, then you should consider hiring an SEO expert. Such professionals have the required knowledge and expertise for taking your SEO efforts to new heights.

According to HubSpot, businesses that are involved in blogging get 55 percent more website visitors compared to those who don’t.

But do you know blogging is not enough? To capitalize on your blog for conversions, you should include at least one call-to-action (CTA) button in each of your blog posts.

A study by Small Biz trends shows that 70 percent of small, B2B businesses lack a call-to-action. Therefore, we’ve gathered a few simple tips for creating effective CTAs to help skyrocket your conversion rate.

• Use action-oriented text on your CTA buttons, such as ‘Start Your Free Trial’, or ‘Reserve Your Seat.’
• Focus on the color of the button, one of the best practices is to use the orange color.
• Ensure that text on the button is readable, concise, and should clearly tell the reader what to do.
• Your CTA buttons should represent a sense of urgency, for example, ‘Register and Get 50% off Today.’

By now, we know that businesses, especially startups should focus on blogging. This is because it gives your business an opportunity to reach out to customers and convert them into clients through nurturing. But blogging is no piece of cake and requires a substantial amount of your time and effort. So, how do you determine whether your business blog is paying off?

This can be done by looking at your blog’s analytics that shows if people are reading your articles, which posts are performing well, and other useful insights. Thus, if you own a business blog, the first thing you should do is get started with Google Analytics by setting up your account. This will allow Google Analytics to collect your blog’s data and present it to you in the form of reports, as shown below.

All said and done, the magic happens when you put your readers at the top. Create content that can help answer their questions, or provide them with valuable recommendations. This would automatically result in ever-growing blog subscribers, increased comments, and social shares, hence increasing the chances of growing client base for your business.

Originally published at https://diymarketers.com on May 15, 2020.