Yes, small business owners. If digital marketing is part of your marketing mix, you’re hopefully trying to figure out what role you company blog should play. It’s nonsensical to curate and write content on a weekly basis only to have it sit on the shelf with the hope that your specific audience happens to stumble upon it. It’s old news that “content is king” and that inbound marketing is THE way to generate the best leads at the lowest cost (if you do it right, of course). But how does a blog develop an engaged following with content taking center stage and also boost your brand reputation in order to capitalize on all of those leads?
The saying that a man is only as good as his woman couldn’t be truer in the world of content marketing where content is king and conversion is queen. In chess, the most dynamic player, the queen, moves any number of squares vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Similarly, great content can’t do much without a powerful player that moves with ease throughout the digital landscape.
“Content needs vehicles for people to pass it along, discuss its merits, argue over its controversies, blog it, mash it, tweet it, and even scrape it.” – Copyblogger’s Senior Editor Sonia Simone
We don’t need to remind you of the many reasons why you should already have a blog up and running. But just in case you’re still not sold, check out this post by Hubspot on The Benefits of Blogging for Business and Marketing.
We do however need to tell you that, short of a miracle, unless you follow these 7 rules, your blog will never be a successful conversion machine.
1. Stop writing for the sake of it. Seriously.
Hate to break it to you, but unless you’re already a celebrity, people couldn’t care less about what you have to say. Without a strategic blog plan that centers around keyword conversion, you’re going to have a bad time if you just spit out content because you “have to”. Take the time to align your SEO, PPC and SEM for a proactive blog to get easily found by the right audience!
2. You haven’t made it easy for people to find and share your content.
There is a sacred list of features your blog must have for easy distribution and consumption. Lucky for you, this sacred list made it into this post:
Blog Home Page
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1) Social share buttons
2) Search feature to search for topics
3) Categories for each channel of service or topic
4) Word tag bubble
5) Large featured image
6) Social counters for followers social media followers
7) Top 2-3 shared post or a featured post or a sticky post section
Blog Post Page
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1) Social share buttons
2) Search feature to search for topics
3) Categories for each channel of service or topic
4) Word tag bubble
5) Large featured image
6) Social counters for shares under title of post
7) A related post section
3. You don’t really know your audience.
Stand out from your competition by talking directly to your audience rather than at them. Let them know you value them and that they are what makes the blog, well, a blog. Content shouldn’t be a one sided conversation! If there’s no engagement, it’s a clear sign that something is wrong!
4. You don’t use tools like BuzzSumo and SumoMe.
Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor and find the key influencers to promote your content with BuzzSumo. If you are going to create content, take the guessing game out of what type of content is needed and use this tool to be more strategic and save yourself time and money. SumoMe are a set of tools to grow your website’s traffic. They’ve spent over 4 years building these tools internally to grow the AppSumo Newsletter to over a million subscribers. Heat Maps shows you EXACTLY where people are clicking on your site. With this information, you can then improve your pages to show your visitors what they want to see. List Builder converts one-time visitors into lifelong readers and email subscribers. All of this hard work and blogging to get people to your site should pay off with a least and email right? The beautiful List Builder lightbox makes sure they subscribe to your email list and come back for more! Easy share features also make this app one of the best in the business.
5. You don’t design with the reader in mind.
It’s important to use clear and simple design when you have anything that deals with content. People are busy and have cluttered lives so the last thing someone wants to do is read a boring blog post with no images on a cluttered design. Use colors and branding element that are speak to your audience. This is a no brainer, but worth saying. Don’t design a blog that’s intended for a business audience in all pink. Work with a professional web designer who can tell you how your blog should look based on your audience and then actually take their feedback seriously since they know what they are talking about. Learn how to remove your personal bias as the blog isn’t intended for you.
6. You’re not consistent.
A blog’s goal is to have a place for conversation. Don’t be shy or negligent of your audience. They don’t owe you anything, so take their attention seriously and give them something valuable and do it often in return. Consistency, more than anything else, pays off when you are pursuing an audience. Building a readership does not happen overnight but if you blog regularly and take the time to invest in your readers (individually and as a whole) the return on your investment will be worth every cent spent. This can look like a serious group of brand partners, or open the door to several leads that want to know more about your products or services.
7. You don’t use the RIGHT images.
The truth is that images will make or break your post. You can absolutely find free and GOOD images for you posts. It’s a lie that you have to cut here to “save money”. You are really shooting yourself if the foot if you don’t go all the way to the last detail with a post and this means doing a quick 15 min search of any royalty free stock image sites like Unsplash, Gratisography, and Pixabay to find meaningful images that add page value worth it’s weight in gold.
These sacred rules might seem like a whole ton of work. They are, but your blog doesn’t stand a chance against the competition if you don’t take these best practices seriously. Any serious small business owner who wants a conversion blog needs to know that if they don’t commit to blogging with these practices in mind, they may be wasting their time and money. The blog doesn’t have to be large scale to be effective. Focus on curating quality content that centers around keyword conversion. It will take you a lot further than you might think!