Writing a good blog is difficult. This I know, because I’ve been doing it for many years now. But part of the reason why I love doing it is because it’s hard. Because it’s challenging. And because it really, really makes a difference.
Blogging for business still matters, which is great because that means I get to still keep doing it. This are tons of impressive stats that point to why blogging remains important, most importantly for small businesses is their ability to improve SEO results. Put simply, the more quality content you have on your site, the greater the chance that you will “hook” a client through Google searches. In addition, blogging for business helps to:
- Explain your brand to new customers who may not know much about you.
- Strengthen relationships with your already existing customers by showing your commitment to them through transparency and knowledge sharing.
- Prove that you are a trendsetter and business leader.
- Provide ways to share what you do through various social media channels.
- Add value to the overall customer experience.
Statistics and analytics are pivotal to measuring progress, and also help prove my point that blogging is not trivial, but integral to building a business. Here are just a few measurements of how blogging can make a major difference, obtained from SocialMediaToday.com’s infographic, “The Benefits of Blogging: 20+ Stats Business Owners Need to Know.”
- Companies that blog receive 55% more visitors to their website.
- Blogging companies earn 97% more inbound links, which are beneficial for SEO.
- 70% of customers use articles to learn about a business, rather than ads.
- Half of the top 200 Fortune 500 companies have blogs.
- A quarter of Internet time is spent on reading blogs and on social media.
Blogging is not easy, though, but unfortunately many business owners think it is. They will often ask employees who happen to be good writers to create something off the side of their desks, and this never works. Creating a good blog takes time, plus expertise in writing for the web and the use of keywords. This is why I always highly suggest investing in your online content creation properly. If you don’t know what you’re doing, blogging mistakes are easy to make, and they can really turn off your customers.
Here’s What Not To Do When Blogging
Blogging mistakes happen often, as there is not enough care and attention put into to creating the content. Here are the most common blogging mistakes:
- Blogging about topics that aren’t of interest to your customers. It can be easy to get caught up in SEO and keywords and write to optimize those. But I have found that my best-performing blogs are those that speak directly to the audience, and answer questions they are actually asking.
- Being too stiff and clinical. Lots of us were taught to write like we’re submitting reports to a superior, but this type of writing does not speak directly to customers. Know who your audience is and write for their demographic. For example, if your target audience is millenials, they are generally global beings who are deeply in tune with the environment, plus concepts such as community-building and equality. Hence, it’s important to incorporate content that speaks to fairness, openness, and societal values.
- Writing titles around keywords. It used to be really important to include keywords in titles, but it’s not so much now, thank goodness, because it’s really hard to create a good title while also including unnatural language. Right now, it’s all about query-based content, which allows for you to pose a question in your title, and then answer it in your content.
- Not using subheads and bullet points. Organizing your content is pivotal for ensuring people will actually read it. In today’s world, as people browse through their many devices while they have a few extra moments, subheads and bullet points allow for easy scanning and will keep people on your pages much longer.
- Not using outside sources. It’s just not believable that a blog writer knows everything off the top of their head. Adding outside sources proves you’ve done your research and are doing your best to provide the most accurate information you can.
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