Starting a blog for your business
Whether you’ve already got a business website, are relaunching your site or starting a new one from scratch, it makes sound business sense to have a blog.
A blog is a great way to bring potential customers to your site through search engine optimisation (SEO). Rather than searching specifically for your products or services, people search for the answers to a particular question or advice on a particular subeject and your blog can provide that for them.
When you use your niche knowledge to write an informative and engaging blog, it builds trust with your audience. A blog makes your business look more credible, which is especially important if your brand is still new and not very well known.
Done well, blogging can be a really integral part of your marketing efforts. But done badly or half-heartedly, it can be a waste of time. So it is important to learn how to start and manage an effective blog which supports your business.
As well as improving your SEO, a blog gives you more content for social sharing (both from your own social media channels and from those of others) and gives you more pages on your website for calls-to-action (CTAs), leading to increased conversions, including subscribers and sales.
So having a blog makes sound business sense, yet it is still something which many companies don’t do or start and forget about after a few weeks or months. The usual excuses are lack of time, lack of writing skills or running out of topics.
If you don’t have time or the skills, find someone in your company who does! Failing that, employ a freelancer to write for you regularly. You may be surprised to discover how cost-effective that can be.
Whatever industry you are in, you shouldn’t run out of topics to write about. We will share some ideas for interesting and relevant blog posts later on in this post.
But first, let’s go back to basics…
What is a blog?
In case you’re not sure, a blog is an informative site (or part of a site) which is regularly updated and often written in a fairly informal or conversational style.
A blog post is a single post (or article) on a blog. It generally covers a single topic or query and can range in length from around 500 words up to 2,000 words or more. (If you need to make it any longer than that, you may wish to consider dividing it into two or three separate posts.) Apart from words, a blog should contain images and may also contain video or other media.
When looking at a blog, you will usually see the most recent blog post at the top.
Blog posts are a way for your business to publish more in-depth insights, thoughts, and stories about any topic relevant to your industry or your company itself. Your blog can help boost brand awareness, credibility, conversions and sales, as well as driving traffic to your website.
Some popular blog formats to get you started are:
The ‘how to’ post – the possibilities here are almost endless. Every industry and business will have a huge range of how tos from how to fix a leaky tap to how to style last year’s outfit, how to get your cakes to rise every time or how to help with GCSE maths homework.
The newsjacking post – you have to act fast with this one! A newsjacking post is when you produce content that references breaking news and trending stories. By jumping on the bandwagon of a trending topic, you will get increased traffic to your site and more eyes on your business. A good example would be a sustainable business publishing a newsjacking post in response to a new climate change story.
The list-based post – this is a great idea for getting lots of views, as people love a list – everything from 20 great days out in the Cotswolds to 50 ways to keep your teenager amused in the school holidays to 10 ways to attract bees to your garden will attract traffic. Putting together a list-based post can be a lot of work, so it makes sense to link back to old posts – if you’ve already written 10 detailed posts on particular days out, you can link back to them. You can even link your list posts to outside sources – as long as they’re not in direct competition with your business.
The pillar page post – sometimes known as an ‘ultimate guide’, a pillar post will be your most authoritative and detailed blog post on a particular subject. Usually longer than other posts, it will take some work to pull it together (again linking back to some of your other posts on the same subject). You definitely won’t start your blog with a pillar post, this is something you should write when you have established some credibility in your niche.
How to write a blog post
Before you write a blog, you need to be sure every post will be interesting and informative enough for someone to read it – and to encourage them to go back to read more.
Before you start writing your blog post, you need to have a clear understanding of your target audience. What will they want to know about? What will they relate to?
If you already have buyer personas of your perfect customer at this point, that makes the process much easier. The more you know about your prospective customers – from age and gender to profession and interests – the easier it is to write posts that will really resonate with them.
A blog should not only answer questions and help readers resolve a challenge, it should do it in a way which is interesting. Your introduction needs to hook the reader and make them want to read on. Then you need to use engaging examples to keep them interested.
A chatty, informal style works well for a blog, but is no excuse for bad grammar or spelling! Make sure you get someone to proofread and edit a blog post before you hit ‘publish’. While readers might let you off the occasional typo, many won’t come back if your posts contain repeated errors, meaning all of your hard work will go to waste.
Setting up a blog
If you already use a CMS for your website, you can set your blog up as part of that. Alternatively, you can start a brand new blog, or blog within a website, using a variety of free or paid-for platforms, such as Wordpress or SquareSpace.
Most business blogs will be part of an existing website, so will only need a separate page on the site eg
https://cotswoldcountryside.co.uk/blog but if you set up an entirely separate blog eg
https://cotswoldcountrysideblog.co.uk you will need to pay for and register the domain with a company like GoDaddy or 123Reg.
As long as your domain isn’t in great demand, you can usually get one fairly cheaply – for example you can get a .com domain from 123Reg for £15.99 plus VAT per year.
The appearance of your blog should reflect your business and the sort of content you are going to share. If your blog is part of an existing website, the work will already have been done for you. But you may still wish to consider how much branding (logo etc) you put on your blog. While you don’t want it to look like an advert, you do want people to know the source of what they are reading.
If your blog is separate from your main site, put thought into your branding, including the colour, before you write your first post. Examples might include green for a sustainable brand or brown for a vintage clothing company – neither of these examples would lend themselves to bright pink, but a women’s fast fashion brand might do.
Make sure you also include your logo and an ‘About’ page if your blog is separate from your main site. The About page should be a brief introduction to your business. Unless you are working in an area like law or financial services, keep it light and friendly, as it helps people to relate to your business and what you do.
Writing your first blog post
Your first blog post should fit perfectly with your business and its aims, as well as meeting the needs of your potential customers.
But don’t jump straight in with a ‘how to’ post. It’s best to build up a bit of credibility first. Before teaching others how to do something, you’ll want to show that you know what you’re talking about in your field over the course of a few blog posts.
So your first post could focus on one niche area eg reducing food miles if you’re an artisan food producer or a success story from your business eg how you prevented a flood at a customer’s home if you’re a plumber. You could also start with a list post eg five ways to reduce food miles at home or five warning signs that you need to get a plumber in.
Avoid making your first post a ‘Hello and welcome to my new blog’ post. If you want to introduce yourself, do it by focusing on the backstory of your business (as long as it’s an interesting one!).
If you’ve got a team, talk to them about ideas for blog posts too – two (or more) heads are always better than one.
Your post needs a catchy and relevant title (and one which is good for SEO). You may need to try a few different ones and spend a bit of time Googling similar posts to see what ranks well in searches. While you should never copy what others have done, there is no harm in taking inspiration from them.
After putting all this work in, you will be ready to write a post. And you need to grab a reader’s attention from the start with an interesting intro. If it’s not interesting, they won’t read to the end – or even beyond the first paragraph.
A common mistake is to feel that a post should be written in chronological order. But nobody wants to read something that starts: ‘In 2015, it was decided by the committee that…’.
Instead, you need to hit your readers with a joke, an anecdote or an interesting statistic, such as ‘Every year millions of gallons of water in the UK are wasted through leaky taps…’.
Next, describe the purpose of your post and how it will address the problems or issues a reader may be experiencing. This will give them a reason to keep reading to find out how your blog will help improve their lives.
Sometimes, blog posts can contain a huge amount of information, which can be overwhelming for the reader. In this case, it is important to break up and organise the text – use photos or graphics, lists, bullets and sub-headings (which are also good for SEO) to break up the copy and make it feel less intimidating.
As an expert in your field who is writing about something you know well, it shouldn’t be too difficult to write a post. But if you are unsure about something, make sure you check your facts and attribute them to the source of information.
To make your blog really work for your business, end every post with a CTA, to encourage readers to take another step. The CTA could be something like ‘Find out more’, ‘Sign up for free’, ‘Get started’ or ‘Subscribe’.
As your blog becomes more established, gains readers and moves up the search engines, you can move on to writing about bigger subjects, covering more highly-searched keywords. This is when you can start to introduce the ‘how to’ and pillar page posts.
SEO
One of the main reasons for writing a blog is that it’s good SEO for your business. Your first few blog posts aren’t instantly going to rank highly on search engines, but it is still important to get the SEO right from the start.
A big element of SEO is keywords or phrases. If your business is quite niche, make sure you focus on unique keywords which are less likely to appear in hundreds of thousands of other posts across the web. The fact is that, if you’re focusing on the same keywords as Coca Cola or Nike, your little blog is going to get lost.
Don’t leave it to chance and guesswork. It’s very easy to find keywords you can rank for on Google. Using a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest, put in the general topic of your blog eg artisan food. This shows 1600 monthly searches and also suggests some related keywords with a lower search volume, like ‘what is artisanal food’ with 140 searches, ‘artisan food near me’ with 70 searches or ‘artisan food business ideas’ with just 10 searches. By focusing on one of these lower ranking keywords, you will be ranked highly for that keyword – with Nike and Coca Cola nowhere to be seen!
Once you’ve established what keyword you want to use, if you’re still not sure what angle to take with your post, run your keyword through a tool like Ask the Public, which shows the sort of questions people ask in relation to that term.
Whatever your keywords, while it’s important to include them, don’t go over the top and use so many that it makes your writing seem unnatural. Google will frown on posts which are over-stuffed with keywords. Make sure you also use similar words and phrases which have the same meaning.
The title of your post is the most important SEO element you have. It should include keywords or phrases your target audience is interested in and which sum up the purpose of the post. But again, don’t use so many that it sounds clunky and unnatural. Stick to around 65 characters if you can, which is the length preferred by Google and won’t get cut off by search pages.
When breaking up your text with sub-headings, you have another opportunity to use keywords, as long as they are a good fit.
Once you have sorted out your title, fill in the meta description. This is a brief (about 150 characters) intro to what your post is about which will appear below the title on Google searches.
Now you are ready to hit publish! Don’t forget to share your new blog post on your social media and email newsletter to help it get some initial traffic. Encourage followers and subscribers to share it too, to help you reach a bigger audience.
Blogging is a great way to bring new potential customers to your website. It can help you build brand awareness, be seen as an expert in your industry and ultimately increase conversions and sales. If you don’t have a business blog yet, now is the time to think about starting one.
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