Facebook Pixel
Join our Facebook Community

Blogging for Business – Why it Works

This is a guest contribution from Maria Mincey.

Based on study by HubSpot, the companies that run a business blog have 97% more inbound links. Now, that’s a statistic that should set rolling the blogging mills of enterprises – be them startups or multinationals. 

Official blogs have had proven benefits for businesses. The very fact that they jazz up the monotonous tone with which a brand is communicating to its audience, and replace it with a line of communication that is much core connective and personal, is what makes business blogs a priceless asset. 

There are several ways blogs benefit businesses, two of which are more than obvious:

It Maximizes Reach

A blog helps companies reach a much broader customer base than their website would. Let’s be honest, how many people bother going to the website of a particular brand or a product they have been using? The websites of companies have to be restricted to providing business-centric information and advertise the offerings of the company. Every bit of information provided on the blog is static, and that is the singularly most relevant reason for your visitors to be totally disinterested in the website, even if they liked to navigate through it on their first visit. Having a blog makes your site dynamic as you keep giving newer insights to the readers and tell a story about your brand.

It Boosts Incoming Traffic by Not just By Intriguing Readers, But also by Enhancing the SEO Aspects

Naturally, when the blog section of your site is offering your readers something new to read, you are bound to get more number of repeat-visits; not to mention the greater number of unique visits as the blog gets shared and liked across the web. But another contributor to this increasing traffic is the optimization of the SEO capability of the website. When you are making quality writers write content for the blog, they know how to write interesting articles while injecting the relevant keywords that is identifiable for your target audience and also let the search engines crawl your website with a greater degree of eagerness and direct a higher volume to the site. You can add only so much of keywords to your product website. 

Which Blogging Platform to Use?

There isn’t a dearth of highly popular and effort-worthy blogging platforms out there. However, if you wish the blog to click into the top gear right away, there is no need to look beyond WordPress. Acc. to more stats:

WordPress is the most sought-after CMS as more than 19% of the self-hosted websites are running on it. 

More than 17% of Alexa’s top million websites use WordPress.

Now Before You Start, Why do you want to Blog in the First Place?

There are also brands who fail to get the desired results they’d expected their blog to pour in for them. Reason: their blogging strategy was too haphazard and there was hardly a plan into the place regarding who are they targeting and how many numbers they hope to achieve. Apparently, the blogs were headed for doom from the very first day due to the lack of insightful approach.

Here are the questions you, as a company blogger or entrepreneur, need to as yourself:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What percentage of that blog audience is prospective buyers?
  • What do they really want to read (what should be the mix of company related info, the industry related info and the interesting bits that only remotely connect to your brand)?
  • What should be the frequency of your posts?
  • How good is your networking?

Unless you have a clear-eyed answer to each of these questions, it is advisable to wait

Know What You Have to Write

It is understandable if you find yourself scrambling for topics to write on or deciding on how to structure your posts. But there are several things to be tried out:

  • Create the “best of ….” style posts. Such posts do command attention and get a lot of clicks. If written in a qualitative manner, they also get shared over the social media.
  • Post reviews, but not just of your products. Let’s say you are running a blog for a job portal. You can post a review of some movie that has released recently that is themed around careers and accounts for some relevance to what you represent.
  • Interview the influencers in your industry. People love to read interviews, and they are going to do their bit to boost the traffic.
  • Crowd source your content. When you ask your readers to be your contributors, and if and when they contribute, they are going to boost the site visits by sharing their own content among their circle.

Have some really interesting titles and subtitles for the articles in order for them to take hold of the readers. There is a large section of Internet users who like to just scan the content by reading only titles and subtitles – and more often than not, they only segue onto the subsequent content if they find the subtitle intriguing enough.

Again, on the Internet, shorter paragraphs would mean more attention span.

Do make sure that you break your post into bullet points in order to make it more readable.

Get some Professional SEO Help

If you haven’t realized it yet, it’s seemingly impossible to attain high volume of traffic without resorting to SEO. The SEO professionals know how to make your website more visible across the web, how to create relevant backlinks and at which places. Getting a good page rank for your site is extremely important, and that’s one area SEO professionals are able to address successfully. 

Getting an appreciable number of organic visits a day is what dictates the success of your blog at the end of the day. When visits from Google start pouring in, you can be rest assured that your blog is one the right track to empowered traffic. 

Some of the keyword tools that can be used include:

Keyword Planner

Word Tracker

The keyword tools can help you know what are the keywords that get most searched by the audience of your industry. The meta tags and meta descriptions are arguable very important for any website to place its targeted keywords in a manner most reachable for the search engine crawlers. The meta descriptions can be up to 140 characters – so you have a fairly good scope of including the keywords into them. But what works bets is when you place the keywords at the very beginning of the description.

The Images of the Post

The images in your post not only make them more readable by telling a story and moving it forward, but images make a great SEO tool as well. Do not let your image files’ name sbe gibberish. When you name them appropriately, there is a greater chance of them cropping up in the Google image search results. Also, do fill out all the fields. There is a field, “Alternate text”. It will serve you well if you don’t leave it blank and write something in four to five words that describes the content.

Make Sure the Keyword Density is Just Right

When you are sure of the keywords you are including are relevant and will do their bit in bringing in the traffic, the next thing you need to be sure of how densely you spread them across the content. Experts say it should not exceed more than 2%, since Google might penalize you for forcing the keywords into the content. And when you are including keywords in any post, make it certain that those are visible within the first two lines of the post.

Banality may more often than not find a room in business blogs since they are presenting information about an industry that already has voluminous literature dedicated to it. But giving your writeups a spin that is unique – both in terms of technical bits and the language – is what helps you stand out from the herd. 

Maria Mincey is a blogger who loves to share everything about web development and new web design technologies initiatives. She currently works as a chief writer for WordPrax , a PSD to WordPress Conversion company and has a quantum experience to share. Follow her on Twitter: @mariamincey64

About Guest Blogger
This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Hi Maria,
    My humble opinion is that whether you are blogging already to promote your small business or thinking of starting a blog, using a blog to promote your small business is one potent way to achieve uncommon success
    The lack of understanding the fundamental principle of what blogging is really all about has made many small business blogs bore people (especially potential customers) with dry sales-speak such as how competitive their prices are. They use their blog to sell first and foremost. This I see as a BIG mistake.

  2. Hi Maria,

    This is an absolute no brainer, and your post proves why.

    Businesses should be blogging. Get on the ball. Expand your reach. Some forget that a blog is one stop shopping for customers, and for potential customers. Video, podcasts, articles, reviews and all of these awesome pieces of content can be publish to a business blog.

    I’d add to stay on topic. Speak business. Of course not every post will be a glowing review of your business. Few should be.

    Instead, focus on the nuts and bolts of your business. Share how you can solve your client’s problems for free, through your posts, and you’ll find that you have more clients. That’s the secret; you’re not business blogging to grow business, your business blogging to grow relationships, to solve problems, and to give away awesome free content.

    Doing these things grows your business of course, but when your intent is on serving and not getting, all falls into place nicely.

    Thanks so much for sharing Maria.

    Tweeting in a bit.

    Ryan

  3. Keyword is the important part.. We need to know what keyword that being used for our blog..
    Yes, wordpress is the best platform for blogger

  4. 1 thing I learned about “blogging for business” is most people love reading blogs from people they don’t know about things they’ve done in their day. It could be anything from how your day went at work, a blog post about pets, or whatever. People just want to read something down to earth from others. And, I find that this is a great way to “blog for business,” as you can have ads on your blog from affiliate programs and contextual advertising services and easily make money. I also discovered that if you do this long enough for 2 to 3 years, you can potentially earn some serious money. Most people are still not hip to the fact that blogging for business in their spare time is a great way to go to supplement their existing income from their day jobs.

  5. Great article Maria, another reason why blogging works is because it helps position your brand as an authority in the field.

  6. Instead of the static content that we see on the big companies websites, I agree that if they have a blog with dynamic content, it will bring returning customers as people are normally bored to view the static content. And I think big companies can easily start successful blogs as they can put some money into hiring good writers and some people to manage their blogs. This idea can not only be limited to big companies but can also be extended to local shops. For example, I have recently visited a small restaurant called “Chocolate Room” where they are offering different varieties related to chocolate. What if they start a blog and start writing about different things related to chocolates and cakes and other things? Don’t you think, it will bring them more customers?
    Thank you,
    Subbu.

  7. Personally, I think you left out the most important motivation for blogging and “why it works” for a business. In my opinion, blog posts make a business, business owner, blogger, look current…as in up-to-date and at the forefront of their industry. Websites with most recent blog posts a year ago do not give me the warm fuzzy that the head of the company is current. I would therefore look for other alternatives as solutions where blog posts are current and timely than with websites that appear behind on the times.

  8. Totally agreed – WordPress has been and still is the best blogging platform (for both personal and business blogging).

  9. Totally agree with you. Also, build a blog and provide consistently valuable contents to visitors is the best way to build relationship with the visitors and that’s way they will become your audience soon!

    Thanks for the content!
    Joseph Thanh

  10. Interesting post Maria. I am still shocked at how many businesses do not blog! To me it is something that has to happen straight away when your website is created.

  11. Blogging is a cool business but requires a great strategy to earn money from it. Among all the CMS available, WordPress is the best for me.

  12. Blogging is the most important part for all business, and no one should ignore this. This is a wonderful article and i think every business holder should read this to attract more and more customer.

    Thanks Maria for this article.

  13. Blogging is one of the best and fastest way for online users to do anything either to share or to make huge amount of money.Blogging is such a type of Business on which many of us depends now a days.
    Very helpful article for me for those also who start blogs.
    Thanks for Sharing.

  14. I saw many of internet users depend on blogging.I think blogging must be upcoming earning source for new generations.

  15. Great post!
    I am getting your inspiration from this post.
    I have just started blogging before 3 months.It will help me a lot.
    Thanks for sharing!

  16. Blogging is one of the best way to promote any business online. On the content of the article to target audience, we should even focus on the trending articles. Readers like to read the ongoing articles and whatever is happening around the globe. So, going with the trending articles is a good way to promote the business.

  17. Well Said !
    I completely agree that any business with a website should blog and blog regularly. Blogging is something that one can’t afford to miss. Keep up the good work.

  18. I agree with all you said in this article post because, truly blogging can give a good leads for your business product. Thanks for sharing.

  19. Hi , Maria Mincey.

    Thank you for your clear directions forward and your encouraging affirmations. It is a good way to improve our audience and engagement with our readers. I’ll surely give them a try.

    Regards,
    Stephen

  20. The foremost variable that makes blogging awesome for all business is because it’s a communicative mouthpiece. :)

    It allows you to ask questions, to tell stories, to sell your products.

    It’s essentially an authoritative presence that’s otherwise unobtainable, and many “large” businesses fail to take advantage because quite frankly, they’re too big and don’t have any personality.

    That’s why small entrepreneurs like us can sneak in and claim all the glory for ourselves.

    Our little secret? :)

  21. Rizvia says: 09/03/2014 at 4:15 pm

    I have found your article very interesting.Like you I also think blogging can boots up traffic for your website but before strating blogging you need to consider some tips.Thanks for sharing.

  22. For me WordPress and Google Adsense are the most important pillars of my blogging business.

  23. Fantastic article Betty, another reasons why blogging works is really because it aids position the brand as a possible authority inside the field.I love this blog.

  24. And Marcus Sheridan also proves that blogging can help a business grow when it is done right and consistently over a given a period (and even with his success with River Pools, he and the ‘team’ still blog).

    But one should remember that this isn’t something you do for a few weeks or months then abandon (later on wondering why your blogging efforts results in very little).

  25. Blogging for business surely works. Blogging is a great way to show your customers (and potential customers) that you have knowledge about your business.

  26. Great article, totally agree. Fresh content is definitely the way to help grow your business and a friendly informative blog, works wonders.

  27. Agree with you. I m also planning and hope i will create my own Blogging Business at Higher Level :) Thank you for the Inspiration.

  28. In the old days websites were just business cards. Companies were telling potential customers what they do and how to find them. Things have changed. These days your potential customers and Google wants you to prove to the world that you are an absolute expert within your industry. That’s why you MUST have a blog.

A Practical Podcast… to Help You Build a Better Blog

The ProBlogger Podcast

A Practical Podcast…

Close
Open