Before we dive into what your business should blog about, let’s take a quick second to analyze some powerful statistics about blogging and why it is important for your business.
If you want to drive traffic to your website in 2019 and beyond, you need to have a blog. You may not like it, but this is just a fact of modern business.
B2B Companies
For those in the B2B space, research shows a 67% increase in leads for businesses that blog, over those that don’t.
This is fueled by the fact that 96% of B2B buyers reported wanting more in depth content about the service or product before making a purchasing decision.
Overall, this makes for an average of 7 touch points needed with a B2B lead before you can convert them.
The more content you have, the more opportunities for touch points, and to establish that your brand is a thought leader in the industry.
To demonstrate this relationship, B2B companies with content marketing strategies involving high-quality blog content generated converted 6x more than those who did not.
With so many competitors out there with high-quality services and products, you need to differentiate your brand.
Blogging, along with other content marketing efforts is a very cost-effective way to generate organic leads over time while differentiating and strengthening your brand and growing your audience.
These touchpoints turn your visitors into leads, because they are attracted organically through search and social, they are much more qualified.
By filtering these new highly qualified B2B leads through your sales funnel with additional content through retargeting campaigns, you can increase lead conversion, traffic, and brand awareness all through the power of blog content.
B2C Companies
Trying to get people to buy on your site but having a hard time ranking, and PPC seems a bit too high for what you are trying to rank for? This is where blogging comes in.
61% of Americans purchase products that were recommended to them in blogs.
On top of that, companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those who do not, leading to almost twice the traffic coming from external sources such as social media and other websites.
Next, studies have shown that 81% of bloggers who make blogging one of their highest priorities have seen a positive ROI on their marketing efforts.
On average, this leads to a 55% higher website traffic for companies that blog on a very low frequency basis.
For companies that blog more than 16x per month, this figure increases to 900% more traffic than their competition who blogs just 0-4 times per month.
3 Quick Tips for Writing Effective Blog Content
Blogging isn’t as simple as just throwing up a few hundred words about your subject and publishing it – well, it technically can be – but that isn’t what will yield the type of results above.
In order to make a blog for your business that is successful, you need to know what to write about in your blog content.
1. Minimize Direct Selling
Your blogs content should focus on useful and interesting information, with only minimal direct selling – otherwise it will turn people off.
Again, the demographics of the people searching for professional services are educated, informed, and they want reliable information, not a sales pitch.
2. Guide Your Leads Through the Sales Funnel
You’ve probably been to a website that has a blog talking about something you have questions about or a problem solving.
Towards the end of the blog, there is an ad that pops up for an ebook, filled with free information about the exact topic you are searching.
When you click on this call to action within the blog content, it leads you to a landing page that tells you more about the ebook and asks for a bit of contact information before you can download it.
Why is this such a frequently used path for customers on a website?
BECAUSE IT WORKS.
Rather than trying to sell yourself over the top, give the people who are on your page the answers to their questions for free. This establishes your brand as a thought leader in your space, and builds brand loyalty, trust, and awareness.
Once you have their contact information, and have helped them with their problems, they will be much more likely to engage with more content you produce. After the average of 7 touchpoints, if you are qualifying your leads properly, you should be able to convert a much higher percentage of your leads, and turn a large portion of the ones who do not convert into consistent website visitors for your blog content.
3. Answer Difficult and Specific Questions
Anyone can write a blog about “what is blogging”, but very few can break it down into a more complex piece of content “why you need a blog for your business”.
Even fewer could give you actionable tips, statistics, and a step by step guide to making the best blog content for your business.
The same could be said about thousands of subject matters on the internet. The point is, to take the skills and expertise you have as a business or team in your industry, and use it to educate people in your audience who are actively trying to learn more.
The way to do this is by answering the difficult and specific questions within your industry. Doing this on a specific basis with your blog content has two main effects:
- You will be able to exploit content gaps in your industry to scoop up easy wins for website traffic
- Over time, you will become a point of authority in your industry from all of the questions you have answered
5 Things Every Good Blog Needs
A good blog that is effective and aimed at generating more organic search traffic should have the following characteristics:
1. A Title That Has Good SEO and is Relevant
According to many case studies out, titles have one of the highest correlations to the ranking of a page on Google search engine results.
While there are hundreds of other factors that all play a role in the ranking algorithm, titles are certainly important, mainly because they are a users first impression of your blog content before ever entering your site.
This means you need to know what to add to your titles in order to catch their eyes and get them to click when they see your page in the SERPs.
In order to make your blog content more effective and garner more clicks, you should try using some of these tricks and tips to optimize your title tags:
- Add numbers ( “10 Best …”)
- Add symbols when possible ($, % …)
- Use questions (“What is the best way to…”)
- Use parentheses and brackets () []
- Use your target keyword or phrase in your title
Using these techniques (without going overboard) can be very effective at boosting CTR to your blogs, driving more traffic to your website.
2. Internal Links and Calls to Action
Links and calls to action make a noticeable difference in the effectiveness of your web content over time.
When making the best blog for your business, you need to make sure that from the start you make the best effort to maintain and grow your internal link structure.
This is done by linking relevant articles and pages to your blog content in order for both users and web crawlers to access and associate with your sites subject matter.
While links are more for the bots, they are still clicked sometimes by users, which boosts click through rate on your site and also decreases exit rate, increases time on page, and adds a new session from the same user – all great signals being sent to Google.
But besides that, they can be used to guide your leads through the sales funnel by using calls to action. Rather than just linking something in plain text on your blog, a CTA is a visual cue for users to go to another page.
This comes in the form of landing pages, value offerings like ebooks and case studies, and other visual links to additional blog content for your brand.
Every good blog post should have a few calls to action and internal links in order to send good signals to Google and effectively turn your visitors into qualified leads.
3. Effective Headings and Subheadings
One thing that a lot of bloggers fail to utilize the full potential of is their headings and subheadings.
Web crawlers and people both benefit from blog content that has optimized headings, resulting in more traffic to your site.
Web crawlers will index headings and subheadings differently from regular text. This means you should pay attention to using the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 tags properly in your blog in order to give it the best chance to rank well.
Best practice is to only have a single h1 on a page (this will be your title), and then stratify down the line as needed. Using h2s next, with subheadings of them being h3s and so on.
On top of using headers in the right context, you want to make sure that you are maximizing the SEO potential of your headings without going overboard.
This is a delicate balance, but you can easily do well at it quickly if you imagine your headings as a table of contents or index for your page.
4. Social Sharing
One of the best ways that blogging affects businesses is through the social networking effect. While it can occasionally take a long time to get to this point, you can have pieces of content go viral and have a wide social sharing effect that is created around it.
Even just a few social shares can go a long way at the beginning of your blogging journey, so you will want to have this setup right away.
5. Images and Infographics
Images and infographics actually have a massive effect on the readability, shareability, and traffic for a blog post.
In fact, here are some statistics about the effectiveness of infographics in blogs that may blow your mind:
- According to Hubspot, people share infographics 3x more than they share any other type of content
- 51% of B2B marketers say that visual content is at the top of their list to produce more
On top of this, blogs that contain images get 96% more traffic of those that do not. You can almost double your blog traffic simply by adding a single image to it.
Creating the Best Blog for Your Startup
Now you understand why blogging is important, what common mistakes to avoid while blogging, how to write effective content, and some elements that every single blog should have.
Sometimes, hiring a top content marketing agency is the best decision for your business, but often you can handle the content creation yourself.
One more tip before you get started making the best blog for your startup business is to remember that consistency is everything.
Even if you can only manage to produce one blog per week, or month, staying consistent is the most essential part of blogging.
Without consistency, it is difficult to maintain and grow any type of organic web traffic to your website and generate online leads with your blog content.
As long as you apply these tips for how to make the best blog, you should have no problem succeeding at growing your online brand and reaching new audiences, while increasing your lead conversion and positioning yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
