For businesses that are serious about creating great content, having a blog is more important today than ever before. Blogs fit into your email marketing campaign and allow you to humanize your marketing with thoughts, advice, and insights. They help to establish you as an expert in your field.
If you’re serious about getting started, here are things you’ll want to consider:
- Why are you creating a blog? How does it benefit your business and more importantly what information are you providing that is of value to your readers? These goals will guide the rest of your decisions.
- Who are you going to be speaking to? Know your audience – is it a business to business or business to consumer.Who are the people who are going to be reading your blog? What type of knowledge can you share with them? What are the questions to be answered?
Our blog, for example, is all about providing helpful insight and practical advice for small businesses and nonprofits that are interested in marketing and growing their business. Every piece of content we create is written with that audience in mind.
- What are you going to talk about? Every blog is built on certain “cornerstone” topics. This plays a key role in the marketing plan established for 2019. By establishing the topics you’re going to focus on, you’ll be able to make better decisions about what ends up on your blog. This will enable you to build a community around your blog and increase the chances of having readers referring other people to it. This won’t only put your content in front of a wider audience but will also be valuable for boosting your presence on search engines like Google. Google alerts on general topics are easily shareable on your social media, but also may give you ideas for upcoming blogs.
- How frequently will you be able to post? Like with all the stuff you’re already doing to market your business online, the frequency will need to be an important consideration when starting your blog. Be careful not to go great guns at first and burn out. Commit to posting and create hard deadlines in your marketing calendar when you want the posts to go up.
- What type of content do you want to create? One of the biggest misconceptions people have about blogs is that a certain level of writing expertise is required to create one. What questions can you answer for your audience? Write out these answers or simply record yourself answering the questions. The fact is that for a lot of people, writing isn’t something that comes easy nor is it something they particularly enjoy doing. For those people, incorporating other types of content like photos and videos may be a better alternative. Additionally, blogging can be outsourced. The Edmiston Group writes a number of blogs for different businesses.
- By creating a Marketing Calendar first your blog can flow with other marketing efforts. For example, as trade show season approaches, the Edmiston Group talks about how to prepare for a trade show utilizing social media and email marketing to drive traffic to your booth. We also blog about the follow-up after a show and incorporating those leads into your newsletter and sales funnel.
By having a blog on your website it creates new content for the web crawlers for SEO purposes. This also establishes you as the original author. We put a standard About the Author at the end. Over time, when searching for particular topics, you will see various blogs pop up in Google search.
The good news – by answering these questions you’ll already have the bulk of that first post written. Why are you creating a blog? Who are you speaking to? What topics will you be writing about? How often will you be posting?
Okay, you know what you need to do—now it’s time to do it! Need some help? Email or call 724-612-0755.
About the author: Autumn Edmiston is the CEO and owner of the Edmiston Group. The Edmiston Group is a multifaceted Pittsburgh based marketing consulting firm providing senior level marketing management services to businesses and non-profit organizations on a short or long-term basis. Core areas of service are business development, marketing, strategic planning and public relations. The Edmiston Group has consistently delivered and implemented real-world, proven business marketing ideas and strategies for business.