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8 essential things every business owner must know before starting a blog

Introduction

Search engines around us, always welcomes new content and having a blog is a very important and inexpensive way to show up on these major search engines. Hence we have curated 8 essential things every business owner must know before starting a blog to make your blogging experience smooth and efficient. We also have some tips for business owners who already started their blogging journey, trust me, it’ll only make your life easier.

1.Increase Traffic to Your Site by using SEO

SEO consists of multiple elements and understanding what each one is and how it works is vital to fully understand its importance. When SEO is used correctly, a website becomes more visible, which increases traffic and conversion opportunities. Another reason SEO is vital is that creating good content and optimizing your website with on-page SEO will help improve the usability of your site and create a seamless and positive customer experience. SEO basics nowadays is something every business owner must know or should learn more about.

With regards to SEO, many do not make use of the paid search data to its full extent.

My recommendation is to use paid search data to assist your SEO campaigns, and get started right away. Using paid search data and advanced research and keyword you are able to identify areas where you have a competitive advantage, and where you can drive revenue to the business. 

It is pragmatic to conclude that you are missing out if you are not implementing these key areas.

LSI keywords are words and phrases associated with the keyword you are targeting. For instance, consider that you wrote a blog post about social media. LSI keywords could include words like:

  • Facebook page
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Viral content
  • Pinterest 

Google, when it reads this LSI keyword phrase in your article, will understand that the content is about social media.

How do you gather these LSI keywords? By using a free tool called LSI Graph.

2.Go for quality over quantity

First of ask yourself, what do you want in your blog few good quality blogs or many low quality ones?

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted” – Albert Einstein

Quantity of blogs is something the internet already has, just type, tips for business owners before starting a blog, you will find thousands of different blogs. Hence it is very important to stand out, be unique and create something original, something which is not out there, unless you don’t want to be seen amongst the crowd.

In both search engines and social media, high quality content is what promotes your business effectively and maintains your online presence. There is no doubt that quality content creation is one of the most important components of your digital marketing strategy i.e something that every business owner should know.

A good content is based on real time researches, experience and statistics not available everywhere. Quality content is clear as a crystal and has no hidden agendas. The audience now is way smarter than the 90s, they will see right through the content that pretends to be one thing but is just a click bait or an attempt to just get some leads.

A well-crafted piece of content not only connects you with your target audience, but also helps gain the trust of your customers. To put it simply, high-quality content fuels your various marketing methods. It serves as the background on which you promote as well as endorse your business on the internet. 

Because of this, it is of paramount importance to pay attention to the content.

3.Make a calendar, pre-plan your topics and ideas

Blog Calendar for reference
Image Courtesy- Social Media Masterplan

A content calendar can change the blog from just a hobby that is written whenever you feel like it into something more professional and more focused. Furthermore, the calendar helps put your website on the map.

Complex blogs/projects require efficient time management and proper coordination amongst team members. A content calendar helps your team to work hand in hand with each other by properly showing which blogs are upcoming and what blogs are due. Your content calendar is useful beyond just keeping your team running smoothly. When you send a content calendar to a client, it shows that you are organized, professional and you set clear expectations about what are you working on and what shall they expect in the upcoming period.

Advantages of having a Content Calendar

  • Assures consistency
  • Keeps you organized
  • Makes you look professional.
  • Provides a roadmap.
  • Sets clear expectations
  • Ability to refine your content marketing plan

Thank you for reading till here. Here is a freebie Social media calendar for your personal use, just download and you’re set!

Gift – Free Social Media Planner

4.Read and Read

Research has found that when people read extensively they become better writers. Reading a variety of genres helps learn text structures and language that people can then transfer to their own writing. In addition, reading provides business owners and others with prior knowledge that they can use in their stories.

  • Practice makes perfect, so you need to write and read a lot. 
  • Reading more motivates me to write more.
  • Reading allows one to gain knowledge.
  • It will enable a change of perspective on some issues or ideas.
  • It explains different ways to tell your stories and gives you new viewpoints. 
  • Reading enlightens us as to what has been done in writing already.
  • It expands one’s vocabulary and makes one more familiar with the structures of a foreign language.



Also Read: 8 Growth Marketing Metrics Every Founder Needs to Know!

5.Personalize and Format

The content on the outside matters only if there is enough for the viewers to continue reading. In other words, your blog posting might contain the best content available, but if the visual appeal is not appealing, the reader is less inclined to share it or to create links to it.

Part of the reason that formatting is so important is because most Internet users usually scan content rather than reading it. This requires a great post title to draw the reader in, combined with good formatting to highlight key points within the article for the reader to carefully review. 

If you develop those skills well, the reader may slow down and read your post word by word.

6. Be Creative

Being creative is something that every business owner must know, not only while writing A blog but also while selling their products or services. Making a blog creative is something that everyone knows by now, however apart from being creative with your writing, making the whole blog fun and interesting for the readers to read is very important. Long blocks of texts are boring and exerts pressure on the eye of the viewer, adding visually pleasant images and informative infographics, changing fonts or making pointers instead of paragraphs etc are some ways of breaking the monotony and helps readers to not fall asleep while reading.

  • Focus on your audience, fact check, include research to support your points, quotes or insights from experts,
  • Use examples and visuals to illustrate your point (images, graphics, and videos)
  • Use an Editor
  • Make your headlines more interesting
  • Make sure you pay attention to your SEO.
  • Focus on internal linkages
  • Make Use of More Visual Content
  • We recommend that you update your content.

The Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends study shows that content marketers are struggling to produce engaging content. This study indicates that 54 percent of B2B content marketers and 50 percent of B2C marketers suffer from this problem.

7.Contact list

Email Contact List

An email list is simply a list of all the emails your business has gathered from your clients and visitors who might be interested in receiving information, updates, discounts, and other details in a digital format that goes directly to their email inbox. 

Email lists are important because email marketing is far superior to social media in terms of connecting with customers. In fact, email has a 6x higher click-through rate than tweets, and it is 40 times more effective than Facebook or Twitter in acquiring new customers. 

Building an email list is something essential that every business owner must do, not only for blog promotion but also to promote their goods and services, to send offer, to add a personal touch by wishing clients on important days or events and even getting more people to subscribe to your emails. Having a sign-up form on your website is a good way to get more people to sign up for your emails.

8.Research about your competitors and keep it original

You and your competition are competing for the same audience. If a similar amount of traffic is being generated by your competitors’ sites, there is a good chance people will be sharing content from your site too. 

Based on the research you can find out what content your competitors are publishing and where they are getting the most engagement, or you may find a post that gets shared widely. As an example, you may see a post about industry trends that is doing exceptionally well. 

You can take advantage of this by writing your own trends article about a different aspect of your niche or industry.

If you wish to find out who the influencers are who are sharing your competitors’ content, enter the keywords that are most relevant to your industry to identify and view the articles containing the most shares. Select the View Sharers option next to the articles and note whom they are most frequently sharing.

 In Conclusion

Apart from these essential things every business owner must know that It doesn’t have to cost you a fortune to create compelling content that gets clicked on, read and shared. You can make more of an impact for less money with our on-demand content marketing services.

Our on-demand content marketing solution is crafted to increase traffic and conversion rates, boosting the value of your business.