A blog is a series of articles written to educate, inform and inspire. These can be written on a dedicated blogging site such as www.blogspot.com, www.blogger.com or www.weebly.com or on a separate page within a company’s own website. For business bloggers, we recommend including a blog section on your own website because this is fully customisable, owned by you and will naturally gain traffic when users visit your website for other purposes. To view an example of how blogs can be used in business, click here. This is for us, Sydney-based marketing consultancy The Marketing Barn.
Business blogging is an information-based marketing strategy that allows you to connect with prospective customers in a non-pressuring way and demonstrate that you’re an expert in your field long before you expect them to make a purchase. Exchanging free information with prospective customers, often in exchange for their email address, allows you to build trust, credibility and engagement with your prospects over time so that when they are ready to make a purchase decision, they consider your business much more strongly than they would another product or service provider with whom they have had no prior experience or connection. Blogging also helps to keep your website current so that existing customers can check back regularly for information and updates that are relevant to them. Using the right keywords in your blog content will also help with your SEO strategies and make you more visible and relevant to prospects who are searching for what you provide.
Many businesses write blogs for the sake of having updated content, but never give consideration to what their readers might be interested in. Some examples of this include industry news, hard hitting facts and figures and summaries of other articles. Though the purpose is to engage with your prospects and position yourself as an industry expert, content that doesn’t interest and engage the reader will never get read. The most effective blog topics will solve a problem that your prospect (or a select group of your prospects) already has. For example, if you run an interior design company, a blog topic written about space saving in children’s bedrooms will be a more beneficial read than one written about a brand new lighting system that has just come on the market. After every paragraph you write you should sit back and ask yourself: is this information interesting to my readers and prospects? And does this information solve a problem that my readers and prospects already have? Content should be written in a conversational tone that is easy to understand and enjoyable to read. If you make your blog posts too technical or complex, your readers will stop finding enjoyment in engaging with you and put your emails in the ‘too hard pile’.
Having a blog is a great thing but writing content and having no feedback about its popularity or effectiveness is a waste. Without website analytics, email open rates and click through ratios, you will have no idea what appeals to your readers and prospects, what helps generate sales and what areas can be improved upon. For bloggers using their website only, website analytics can educate you about how many people have visited a page, how long they’ve spent reading and what links they’ve clicked after landing there. Bloggers with email subscribers can use email open rates and click through ratios to gauge the effectiveness of subject lines, levels of interaction with their readers and the effectiveness of content to generate website leads. If you’d like help setting this up, send us an email and we’ll give you the details of someone who can help.
Subscriptions are an important aspect of blogging. Whether you plan to monetise your blog by promoting the products and services of your own business, or someone else’s, subscriptions are the best way to build a qualified database of prospects who are interested in what you have to say and whose trust in you increases over time. Finding new subscribers is easy as long as your offer is appealing, properly targeted and has minimal steps to subscription. If you choose to promote subscriptions using links and web forms, make the process as easy for the user as you can. If they have to scroll, search for the information or fill in too many personal details to subscribe, the barriers to uptake will be much higher and you will receive fewer subscribers as a result. Generally a CRM system is the best way to record and monitor subscriptions and subscriber behaviour. Your subscriber database can either be integrated with your existing business CRM system or can be kept separate with a cloud-based email marketing CRM system. There are a number of these available on the web or we can help set up one for you.
From a business perspective, it is understandable that you might want to discourage subscribers from opting-out because if you can’t communicate with prospects, it is very difficult to sell to them. However, by law, all subscribers who receive content direct to their email inbox must also have the option of unsubscribing at the bottom of every blog or marketing email sent to them. Failure to follow these regulations can result in your readers becoming displeased, bad-mouthing your business, adding your emails to their Sender Block List and even reporting you to authorities. None of these outcomes create an environment for a sale to be made anyway so it’s best to follow the rules. What you can do is use your ‘unsubscribes’ to analyse your market and content. A good idea is to add an optional ‘reason’ drop-down menu to your unsubscribe page. That way, when readers opt out, they can also choose whether this is because the information you have sent is not relevant to them, or because the emails are sent too frequently.
The key to generating an income from business blogging is in writing about problems that your prospects and readers have and every so often offering a link to a product or service that will help solve it. Your blog can’t be all ads. Just as you wouldn’t be happy to read a magazine filled entirely with ads solving your problems, readers too want a benefit in exchange for their attention. As a general rule, useful, relevant problem solving content should fill about 95% of your blog, with the remaining 5% reserved for ads, subtle sales pitches and links to products or services which are relevant to the reader. Any more than this and your reader will be repelled by the pushy sales pitch and begin to think that they are doing you a favour by reading your content, rather than the opposite. Bloggers can promote their own products or services, or the products and services of others. For example, an online maternity fashion store could create a blog featuring write-ups on birth preparation, baby proofing and preparation and product reviews and could include ads and product shots showcasing their own maternity fashion pieces or make paid recommendations promoting products for other businesses such as baby furniture, formula milk or children’s toys. Business blogging can be successful in generating sales because the reader visits your site or reads your emails by choice and over time, associates this experience as enjoyable and informative. As long as your content remains relevant and your ads point to products and services which can actually solve your reader’s problems, they will trust you enough to click through. If you want to generate income from other companies’ products and services though, you will have to approach those companies and present them with information and analytics showing your blog’s volume of subscribers and their level of engagement.
The Marketing Barn specialises in creating low cost, high impact marketing strategies for small to medium businesses. To get a quote for copywriting, website content analysis, lead generation strategies or a Marketing Health Check, click here. Or, if you have a blogging question, click here and we’ll do our best to answer it for you.