Everything you’ve heard about how vital a blog is for your website is true. When you set up your business, you probably didn’t expect to spend so much time writing or looking for writers to hire. Now you’re reading all the guides on how to improve and design your website, and they all insist you use your blog.
A consistent, informative and readable blog is a great asset for a growing business to have on your website though. What you do with your blog is the big question. What sort of content should you be producing, and how does it deliver increased traffic to your website? Read on to find out.
Create guides
Websites can sometimes suffer from a lack of clarity about the products and services they offer. Turning your blog into a source of knowledge can make it essential reading for customers browsing for information and help to establish you as a thought leader within the community.
For your blog to be successful and garner tangible traffic, you need to give readers a reason to keep coming back. Providing valuable information about what you do and your products is one of the best ways to do that. Writing product guides doesn’t just give existing customers a bit more context, but enlightens new customers who may have stumbled upon your blog while searching for information about a product they’ve been told to buy. This is how you turn a visitor from someone who has never heard of you into a conversion.
A well-written ‘how to’ guide with a keyword-heavy headline written as a commonly searched question can help you gain traction among less informed audiences. You can link internally from these blog posts back to product pages and other sections of the website. Your blog is now one of the first steps of the customer journey. It’s an excellent way to introduce your brand as informed and trust-worthy.
Make it a center for your brand community
Businesses must embrace their brand community these days, and a website must be the center of that community. You can transform your website’s success by building an engaged community around your blog.
Before you start writing your blog, you need to know what sort of audience you’re looking to attract. From there, you can write informative and engaging blog posts that fit in with topics they care about. Without this prep work, you’ll start to attract an audience who is going to be less engaged with your brand and website. Do your prep work properly, and you can use your blog to develop content your community will check regularly by establishing a consistent stream of informative and entertaining pieces that appeal to and converse with them directly.
This can turn your blog into a center point for your website, helping to draw in traffic that can be dispersed throughout the rest of the website. Creating brand-building content on your blog is one of the first steps to building a hyper-engaged audience.
Create listicles
If the enduring popularity of Buzzfeed has taught us one thing, it’s that the world loves listicles. These easy-to-churn-out articles, populated mostly with one-line paragraphs and GIFs, may seem too simplistic for your blog, but it’s actually a brilliant method of establishing yourself and your website with new audiences.
Listicles can be easily put together to serve another purpose, such as getting a strong keyword onto your page or presenting an array of products in an easy to read format. People love reading listicles because they’re easy to digest and written in a way that entices the reader to click, even if they’re not that interested in the topic. You need to see if you also do the ‘Top 10 things everyone does when they wake up’. By populating your blog with this easy to read the content you bring in new readers that can be pushed throughout the website.
There’s no need to turn your website into a listicle factory, just sprinkle some in with your regular content and use them as a way of funneling people into more long-form and engaging blog posts and build familiarity with your website and brand.
Collaborate
Influencers have changed the way brands interact with their audiences online, using familiar and famous faces to sell their products in a relatable way. You can leverage this kind of relationship and fan interest on your blog to benefit your website and brand.
Open your blog up to other writers. This doesn’t mean just accepting pitches, although guest posts are a great method of increasing traffic in your blog, it means going out there and seeking out influencers and thought leaders to write guests posts. Their notoriety and knowledge will expose you to both their existing fan bases and people who are familiar with their standing within communities. By association, your standing within the community will improve. It shows other influencers and brands that you’re willing to do collaborative pieces and opens up the opportunity to get a link from the writer’s website or social media pages, further exposing you to their engaged audience.
Don’t slave away at the keyboard writing all of your own blog posts. Use names with industry influence. A lot of them will be interested in the opportunity to reach new audiences and see the benefit of being associated with an emerging brand such as yourselves.
Complement other content
Your blog can be a great tool to give your existing marketing campaigns an extra boost. Think of your blog as further reading that can support the limited information of the marketing.
If you’re appearing on a podcast write a blog about the experience that the podcast can send out a link to on their social profiles. Complement your own social content with blog posts that delve deeper into the subject manner. If you’re running a competition use a blog post to store all the details or give more information about the prize. It’s about having followed up content for everything you do to keep people engaged for longer.
There is a lot you can do with a blog post to drive traffic to your website. It’s important not to look at each blog post as a singular piece of content that sits within a vacuum, but rather as an extension of your website, social media strategy and company branding that should be used in conjunction with it.
