Most business owners are aware that maintaining blogs on their websites is one of the best ways to leverage the internet to draw in new potential customers. What many have a hard time with, though, is the actual use of a blog to its highest advantage. Here are four tips for using your site’s blog to bring new customers in and increase your reach.
Mix Information and Promotion
One of the first things you need to understand about a business blog is that it isn’t an advertising platform in the traditional sense. To lure and keep readers, you’ll need to provide real, useful information, rather than just promoting your products. Of course, product recommendations accompanying that information are perfectly acceptable. Just make sure that you’re giving the reader a reason to visit and stay on your site in the form of good information.
Focus on SEO
The greatest power of a business blog is its ability to draw visitors organically from search engines to your website. To make this happen, though, you’ll need to perform search engine optimization, or SEO. SEO is the process of making a post likely to rank highly in results for certain search terms. To perform basic SEO, you’ll need to identify a keyword you want your post to rank for, use that keyword in your post several times, include it in paragraph headers and place it in the post title. Though there are much more advanced methods, these are the raw basics of content SEO.
Post Frequently
If you’re going to have a business blog at all, it’s important that you write new posts frequently. Frequent posting will help your search engine rankings, give your audience new content to consume and help you build your brand more quickly. Evans Tire & Service Center’s blog is great example of posting frequency as it is updated with a new post roughly once per month. It’s very important to post on a regular basis. Don’t just post once and then three months later post three times in one month to catch up. Go for once a month at least. If you can, go for every week!
Use Infographics
A great way to set yourself apart from the crowd is to use infographics in your blog posts. Infographics can boil down the most important information in your post to a simple, easily understood visual. This can then be complemented with more detailed explanations in the text.
These are just four of the ways you can use your blog to help build your business’ online presence and reach more customers. By implementing these basic principles, you can make more sales and gain a larger audience of potential customers.
Hannah Whittenly is a freelance writer and mother of two from Sacramento, CA. She enjoys kayaking and reading books by the lake.
