So you’ve decided to start a blog for your business. Great! A high quality blog can be a key part of your company’s digital marketing strategy. However, if you don’t want your blog content to crash and burn when it hits the internet, it’s important to check all the boxes to ensure success. Follow these 7 tips for a successful blog!
Does My Business Need a Blog?
If you are asking yourself this question, the answer is probably a big yes. The main reason your company needs a blog is because it can drastically increase visibility.
The more blog content you create, the more opportunities you will be given to appear in the search results. This increases the odds of your site being placed in front of more eyes. And more views equal more potential clients.
This should be all the incentive you need to get started writing your blog. Even if you don’t have much blogging experience, don’t worry! Whether you are writing for your small business or a large agency, these blogging tips can be applied to any type of blog content.
Write An Eye-Catching Headline
Just like an elevator pitch, your headline should present all the right information that will interest your readers and potential customers. Your blog’s headline should include two things: give an indication of what the blog is about and make the reader want to at least take a peek at your first paragraph.
Your headline needs to pull people in and keep them reading what you have to say!
This can sometimes be accomplished by adding emotional wording to the headline. People are often moved to act by emotion. In other cases, the information in the headline could capture interest right off the bat.
Writing an interesting headline can be done in hundreds of ways! To show you how to do this, we took our headline and rewrote it as a question, appealing to emotion and as a value proposition.
As a question: How Do I Write A Successful Blog?
Appealing to emotion: An Open Letter to Struggling Bloggers
Offering value: The Ultimate Guide to Successful Blogging
There are endless ways to craft a compelling headline. All you have to do is decide which variation works better for your purposes and audience. Get brainstorming!
Your First Paragraph Should Be Compelling
Your first paragraph is like a movie trailer. It should show all the important aspects of your post, but not offer enough information that the reader will want to stop there. This paragraph serves as a lead into the rest of your blog.
Just as your headline should intrigue the reader, your first paragraph should pull the important parts of your story to the front right away. A well-written first paragraph will hook the reader in and encourage them to keep reading all the way to the end.
Write an Engaging and Informative Body
The beauty of blogging is that you can write about anything! However, you must ensure your content is worth reading.
The body of your blog contains the meat of your post. Write well, use proper grammar and don’t make spelling errors! All of these things will turn readers away.
Your small business’ blog should be packed full of informative information. This helps to build your authority and credibility.
If you don’t feel qualified to write on a topic that you may not have much knowledge on, feel free to bring in outside help. Hire a content writer or reach out for a guest post. Guest posts are an easy way to bring in an “expert” in to help you out. It also provides free publicity for them.
Remember, the most important aspect of blogging is to write for humans! It used to be a rule to include a certain number of keywords in the body, however recent research indicates that keyword usage and density is less important to Google than it used to be. The algorithm is intelligent enough to determine if your blog is well-written, so you don’t have to squeeze in hundreds of keywords.
If you are interested in a more in-depth explanation of how Google decides your search rank, check out this article.
Insert High-Quality Images
Adding images into your blog post can increase readership and break up the text in a visually appealing way.
But, you can’t just use any images. Make sure your images are high quality and are not pixelated. If you aren’t taking your own photos, you can use stock image sites. A few free sites are Unsplash and Pixabay.
Including images in your text can also boost your SEO score and increase the time readers spend on your pages. So, it’s a great idea to include aspects of your blog that will keep readers on your page longer. Images, graphics, and typography can encourage people to stick around.
Include A Call-To-Action
You are writing your blog for a purpose, right? Your blog should always include a powerful call-to-action (CTA). CTAs encourage readers to act – to buy a product or service, write a blog comment, join your Facebook group, download a file, or sign-up for a newsletter. Before you start writing your article, you should determine what your CTA is and keep that goal in mind.
Take a look at nearly any social post or a well-written blog post. All of them lead their audience in the direction they want them to follow. For example, you have probably seen hundreds of Instagram captions that advocate a discount code with the words “get yours now!” Creating a sense of urgency is one way to encourage action. Telling your audience what to do works surprisingly well.
Use Clear and Relevant Subheads
Are you effectively using subheadings? Subheads should serve three purposes. First, they work to break up your writing and make it more visually appealing and easier to digest. People will become disinterested if they see a huge block of text and not be encouraged to continue reading.
Second, they help readers navigate to the important parts of the blog. Readers love to skim and extract the most main parts of the text. Third, they boost search engine optimization (SEO). Google will pick up on the keywords in the headings, thus, you might want to be strategic about these.
Include Relevant Internal Links
Have you ever Googled something and then ended up, hours later, down a rabbit hole? You may not even be sure of how you got there!
You want to replicate this with your blogs. Your goal is to bring new prospects in and keep them on your site. A way to encourage this is to include links to other articles on your site (this is called backlinking).
If a reader enjoys your blog, they will click on the link and be led to another page and then later another page. This cycle will continue to ramp up the time spent on your website.
On top of keeping clients around, internal links help build credibility and are considered a good SEO practice. They benefit your SEO ranking as they can increase the number of pages per visit and time visitors clock on your website.
Final Thoughts
These 7 tips for a successful blog are only the most important aspects of your article! If you are having trouble writing a blog post that gets views, make sure you are incorporating these helpful hacks.
While you must remain mindful of SEO tactics such as doing the appropriate keyword research, and writing a great meta description, remember you are writing for a human audience, not the Google algorithm. Google will reward your content if people genuinely value and enjoy it.
In the end, blogging and content marketing should just be one piece of your marketing strategy. You should also be utilizing marketing tactics that encompass social media, ad campaigns and web development. All of these play into the bigger picture. If you need assistance with your marketing needs, feel free to contact us today for your free consultation. We specialize in content marketing and can guarantee you’ll see results.
Happy blogging!
