Why You Need A Blog To Boost Your Business
You’re probably thinking, why do you need a blog for my business? I don’t need a blog to tell everybody what I’m doing, or I don’t have the time to write a diary etc.! Wrong!
BLOG FOR YOUR BUSINESS
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF BLOGGING FOR YOUR BUSINESS?
- It builds brand awareness
- It boosts your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Connects people to your brand
- Develops relationships with new and existing customers
- Great for sharing on social media platforms
As a business owner, it’s not about just writing about what you have to do; it’s about what your business can do for people or what solution it can have if they use your product or service, and when done right, it can bring business in. How?
BLOG BUSINESS PLAN
Here’s a quick guide on what you do:
FIRST STEP
Write your blog post on your website. (Please tell me you have a website! If you haven’t, you need one! Click here; it’s easy to set up and cheap. Anyone can do it.) There’s extra help HERE if you need it.
HOW TO WRITE A BLOG POST?
Here is a quick list to guide to help you.
- What is the goal of the article?
- Choose the problem – How is your post solving a problem for your audience
- Choose a Working Title – Something that draws attention.
- Create your Post – Start writing (at least 1000 words, ideally 1800)
- The Introduction – Make sure you have keywords in this part.
- Final words – Have a conclusion to your post.
- Call to action – Show and entice a product you want to sell at the end of your post.
- Revisit the headline – Make sure there are keywords in the headline
- Edit and proofread – Use Grammarly; it’s the best! It helps me big time.
- Add links – links to other pages on your website as you want people to stay on your site.
- Add Images – people love photos to look at, plus it breaks the writing up.
- Optimize for Search (SEO) Use THIS KEYWORD SEARCH TOOL TO HELP YOU
STEP TWO
Now let me give you an example. You have a crafting business (if you have an Etsy shop check out my 7 top tips to boost sales on Etsy); you’ve sold some products, but you could do with a few more customers, like a heck more!.
How do you get customers to see your products without paying for advertising?!
STUPID SIMPLE SEO
The first and most important thing is to learn SEO. I can’t stress this enough. I wish I had known about this years ago! It would have had lots of traffic from day one if I had implemented SEO on my website, but I didn’t even know what it was and thought it was too technical for my liking, so I ignored it. BIG MISTAKE!
I learned from Mike Pearson’s course Stupid Simple SEO. It’s a simple course that is easy to understand, plus you can refer back to it as and when you need it. Check out his FREE webinar HERE. Alternatively, get my SEO The Right Way E-book.
STEP THREE
You need people to subscribe to your newsletters. Why? These are potential customers. You can contact them any time (within reason) with a new post you’ve just created or a new product you want to sell.
How do you get subscribers?
You will need a subscriber software/plugin. The best out there to get started is EmailOctopus. It is FREE for up to 2500 subscribers, which is really generous.
Once you’ve set up your subscriber software, you need some way of enticing people to subscribe. One great way of doing this is creating a well-presented FREEBIE. People love a freebie, and they won’t mind giving you their email address to get it. Suzie created a great course, Printables by Number to help you do this.
Create your freebie through Canva, or if you’re not into designing, you can buy one and brand it yourself! You can get these from HERE. I have re-branded one of these and re-sold it as I didn’t have the time to create one. So you can use them as FREEBIES or re-sell them!
STEP FOUR
Now you need to create some pins. This is where Canva comes in. Canva is a free graphic design platform to upload your products photos and add some influencing text.
Canva is great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, Facebook posts, Twitter posts, Pinterest posts, etc. A drag-and-drop interface makes customizing thousands of templates simple and easy.
Ok, now join Canva (it’s free), go to templates and select a Pinterest template. I tend to go for a blank one, then you can add your own text and colours etc. On your template, you need questions or statements to draw people in. For example:
- How to tutorials: How a Bookkeeper Can Help Your Business
- Listicle Content: 10 Ways a Bookkeeper Can Help Your Business
- Real-life experience: My Bookkeeper Helped Me When I Was Stressed
- Bold Statements: Here is Why You Need A Bookkeeper
A pin example below
So you can write any of these on your templates, and don’t forget to put your domain at the bottom of your design like I’ve done. Once you have done that, save and download.
The next thing you need to do is set up a business account on Pinterest (it’s free). This is a visual search engine where you get all your free organic traffic. YES FREE!! WE LIKE FREE.
Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more. With billions of Pins on Pinterest, you’ll always find ideas to spark inspiration. Have a look at my Pinterest account to give you an idea of the different Pins I have used. Don’t forget to follow me!
When you discover Pins you love, save them to boards to keep your ideas organized and easy to find. Pinterest is an excellent tool to help increase links back to your website, which, in turn, drives more traffic.
It is more effective at steering traffic back to a website more than any other social media source. Good content on Pinterest starts with creating quality visuals. Pins get you more inbound links.
Add your templates and make sure when someone clicks on your template that you have added the link from your website page or product to the pin (where it says ‘Add a destination link‘) so when someone clicks on it, it goes directly to your website or product which is the whole point of this. All the traffic will go directly to your website for absolutely no fees. How cool is that!!
There is a great Pinterest Keyword Tool Software that you will find very useful for your business. It quickly generates hundreds of top popular keywords directly from the Pinterest autosuggest engine! Plus, easily get search volume, cost-per-click, and competition data using free resources.
STEP FIVE
Add a blog post at least once a week to keep your viewers interested. A daily or weekly blog frequency will only help you increase your traffic if the content is unique, thoughtful, and helpful to your readers. So when you’ve finished your blog post, don’t forget to design your pin each time.
If you have a good template in place, it will save time when creating each pin. All you would need to do is upload your image and change the title each time.
When creating any type of content, it’s always better to follow the rule of quality over quantity, as long as you’re not posting only one blog article per month.
I schedule my pins through Tailwind, so I have consistent pins going out each day, and it saves a lot of time!! Tailwind has communities, so when you join them in your niche, they will share your pins which means more FREE advertising for you!! It’s a no-brainer.
STEP SIX
DO YOU HAVE INSTAGRAM, TWITTER AND FACEBOOK?
I know when you’ve got a business, you may have more than one website, or you want to show off your different landing pages.
With Instagram, you can only have 1 link in the Bio, but there is a quick solution to that by using Linktree. I use it on all my social media, so you see all the pages I want you to see when you click on it. Check mine HERE. It’s a great tool, as you can really let your links stand out.
STEP SEVEN
BLOG FINANCIALS
Make sure you keep track of your finances as blogging is part of your business. Determine how much the average post in each category will cost you to develop in terms of money and time.
For example, a home project or recipe post might get a bit pricey since you have to buy multiple ingredients or decorating tools for your creation. Some of what you buy will be deductible as a business expense, so you’ll definitely want to keep great records of all your purchases so make sure you keep your receipts.
I use Quickbooks to keep on track of mine. It makes my life a lot easier, and I know everything is stored safely as everything is online, so I can log in anywhere and not just my laptop.
And finally…
Time invested in your business blog is time well spent.
I hope you found this ‘blog for your business’ post useful. Let me know how you got on in the comments below. Don’t forget to subscribe for other useful tips in your inbox.