Blogging is a versatile channel to connect with your audience. Your blog allows you to show off your expertise, deepen your brand, and persuade buying decisions. Blog content—especially evergreen content that remains relevant—truly goes a long way. Blogs can be promoted on other marketing channels and be repurposed as other forms of content for years to come.

Through SEO optimization, the content of your blog can help position your brand in the marketplace and grow your market share. It helps you beat out competitors by attracting more traffic to your website. High-quality content can even go viral and spread among your target audience. While blogging may seem like an overwhelming task to add to your small business marketing program, it really has the potential to expand your brand’s reach to catalyze business growth.

 

Why Small Businesses Should Blog

Blogging is an essential piece of most successful digital marketing efforts. Blog posts often become a base for marketing campaigns and your brand voice.

Because your blog is housed on your website, it offers a great opportunity to grab the attention of your target audience with a catchy title and topic and then lead them directly to your products or sales pages. Every blog should have a Call To Action (CTA) that directs your audience to take a specific action like scheduling a meeting with your sales team, downloading a freebie, or directly purchasing a product.

 

What To Blog About

Knowing what to write blog posts about is often where small business owners get hung up. If you’ve been online for a while, you may feel like you’ve already said everything that needs to be said. Topics might be covered in the FAQ section of your website or on social media, but your blog gives you the opportunity to go deeper. With more space to outline your thoughts or to persuade, you can really drive home the ideas that make a difference to your audience.

Here are some standard blog post types that can help to get you going:

• Interviews with customers, employees, or suppliers
• How-to articles about your products
• How your products are made
• What to expect with your services
• Advice for customers new to your industry, products, or services

While those ideas are a great place to start, you may also want to brainstorm with your team or your community. Try surveying customers about what they want to learn about. This can be as formal as a digital survey sent to customers after a purchase or as informal as posting a poll on social media or asking your favorite client the next time you talk. You can also depend on your team to help you brainstorm. Ask questions like:

• What do you wish your customers knew?
• What questions do you get asked again and again?
• What are common misconceptions or myths in your industry?
• What are unusual ways to use your product or service?

Once you get comfortable writing blogs, the ideas will start flowing easily. Jot down your ideas for blog topics as they arise during your work. Eventually, you may even have a large list of topics to work from and will only need to brainstorm every once in a while. Remember that blog posts can be a cornerstone of your marketing campaigns. Each time you have a new offering or develop a new marketing campaign, find a way to incorporate a blog post into that campaign.

 

Best Practices to Optimize SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of configuring the content on your website in a way that makes it more likely to show up in search results on Google and other search engines. Many potential customers begin their buying journey by searching online for a product, service, or solution to a problem of some kind. If your website pops up close to the top of that list of search results, you are more likely to grab their attention and start a relationship with that user or even make a sale. Good SEO will make your brand more competitive online.

SEO is often a technical process that might require the assistance of a web developer or digital marketing specialist (VaVa Virtual can help with that!). Best practices for SEO change all the time as search engine algorithms change, so staying up to date is an essential part of the process. A successful SEO strategy will involve the configuration of your website, the content and copy of your website, and how your website interacts with other entities online.

Blogging helps SEO because it keeps your website fresh with reliable and new information. For many businesses, their blog becomes the number one way users enter their website. This is a great entry point because your blog will have CTAs that direct users to either make a purchase or find out more information.

In general, these practices keep your blog optimized:

• Choose topics that have high search potential
• Use headings and bulleted lists
• Add your main keyword early on in your content
• Write posts that are 1,000 words or longer
• Optimize your title tag, meta description, and images for SEO
• Optimize your site’s loading speed
• Use internal linking (link to other pages on your website)
• Align your content with search intent (answer questions that people are actually searching for online)

As we mentioned, if you’re not sure how to take some of these steps, we don’t blame you. SEO can be complicated and changes all the time. If you need help, rely on your digital marketing expert, content writer, or web developer.

Need help blogging?

Managing a blog is no small feat. It takes lots of organization and planning to do it right. Thankfully, this tool from The Work At Home Woman will make the process a breeze. It helps you make the most out of your blog, and even make some money from it too.

Taking on a blog all on your own can be difficult. You need to do research, write content, find imagery, manage SEO, and then promote your posts. At larger companies, a whole team of people would be involved in that process! However, your Virtual Assistant can help you with every piece of the puzzle.

Virtual Assistants can create an editorial calendar, research topics to write about, manage social media, and so on. Let your VA know which part of the process you find overwhelming, and they can take that off your plate. They can also just focus on day-to-day administrative tasks like email and scheduling so you have the time to dedicate to growing your audience through blogging.