Blog Like A Pro
In case you haven’t noticed, a business can make good use of a blog. Whether it’s on the business site itself or a different address linked to it, content marketing can do plenty for you. It can increase your visibility, give legitimacy to your brand, and build the kind of connection you want with your consumer. But blogging is a venture that takes skill all on its own. If you want to look like a pro, you have to blog like a pro.
Value must be your focus
If you want to improve the search engine optimization of your business and build its visibility, it’s easy to focus on quantity rather than quality. However, that’s not going to do you much good in most cases. Search engines use algorithms, such as visitor interest, to see just how valid content is. For that reason, as ever, value needs to be the core of what you need to know about your marketing strategy. Make it informative and newsworthy or helpful and instructional. It can even be focused solely on entertaining. The fact is it needs value for you to consider publishing it.
That’s not to say the text is all that matters. The visual style of a blog has to have a certain uniqueness to it. If you can’t pay for your own design, then at least try to find ones that aren’t widely used while still being relevant to your theme. Even with images heading blogs, you should take care to personalise them. Instead of throwing up generic images, find or make ones that stand out and customise them further by turning them into banners. Otherwise, you run the risk of looking a generic content mill. That’s the kind of design that will ensure readers don’t even stick around long enough to read what you’ve written.
Reach out
Those readers are important. Not just because they can lend the blog credibility. Those are the kind of leads that the blog can build. As with your social media and all your other marketing efforts, you need to put the work into making a community out of them. Reply to their comments. Get them involved in giveaways and competitions. Ask if they have any topics they would like you to cover.
Don’t be afraid to have a personality
When marketing for a business, it’s easy to play things safe and stick to the branding message and tone alone. When it comes to a blog, however, showing your human side is important. Finding your voice gives you the chance to enliven the intros and outros to articles. It enables you to write comments without sounding like a corporate robot. It creates the human connection of the blogger that a lot of blogger-followers want to see. Blogging is a very social kind of marketing, so you need to get sociable.
Building your audience on the blog is only going to improve the business. That means you have to take time. Time for the audience, time for the visuals, and time, most importantly of all, for the content. Happy typing.