How to Start Blogging for your Business in 2021

I’ve written a couple of blogs about using blogging as a way of improving my website’s SEO, and to inform my social media marketing strategy but I haven’t really talked about how to get started with blogging for your business.

I still believe that blogging is relevant (and important!) in 2021 but I feel a lot of people have given up on their blogs in favour of other marketing methods, like sales funnels and video marketing. Blogging, I believe, should be underpinning all of your marketing activities and plays an important role in attracting and converting your audience into paying clients.

Here’s what I think you need to know about blogging for business in 2021.

Blogs act as a starting point for your sales funnel

While it’s not always the case, more often than not it’s a blog post that will be used to trigger your sales funnel with new sign-ups. After seeing you share a blog on social media, your audience will come and have a read and if they find it useful, will then sign up for your lead magnet or email list for more information like that.

Just with that example, we can see that blogs:

• Provide information on your website for your visitors to read, digest and find value in
• Adds fresh content to your website to assist with your search engine optimisation
• Provides source material for your social media marketing
• Is the discovery phase of your marketing and enables the sales funnel to be triggered
• Just the call to action alone on a blog post can create new customers

This is why I believe it’s so important for every business owner to be adding blogs to their websites on a regular basis, they can do so much in terms of marketing your business, adding more information than your sales pages allow and provide the credibility that you really do know what you’re talking about, too.

So, where should you host your business blog?

Undoubtedly, on your website.

So many business owners I’ve worked with have had a business website, and then a blog hosted elsewhere, such as blogging platforms like WordPress.com, Medium, Linked In, etc.

Unfortunately, doing things this way doesn’t help with your search engine optimization, indeed it can be harmful as you’re sending people away from your website to read the content. It’s easy enough to add a blog to a website and have it all in one place. Then you can “syndicate the content” (as the professionals call it) to third party websites with a link to the original blog.

It’s a good idea to try and change the content slightly on third parties so it’s not exactly the same as your website blog, but as long as you have the original link to your own website and a disclaimer “first posted at my website on this date”, Google should recognise that it’s not duplicated content and affect your SEO.

If you’re unsure how to add a blog to your website and transfer your existing blog posts over, I can help you with that.

What kind of content should I be putting on my blog to promote my business?

This is where a lot of blogs I see fall down for me…they focus too much on the business rather than the audience.

Allow me to explain.

Your blog isn’t about directly promoting your business, it’s about addressing your target audience’s needs and raising your business profile and reputation. Blogging is about presenting information to your audience, helping to identify you as an expert in your field and to be trusted with their needs, but it’s not about trying to make sales directly from your blog posts.

A successful blog won’t even mention your business other than a) as examples of how you’ve dealt with the topic at hand with a customer, or b) in the call to action right at the end. That’s because the reader, your potential customer, isn’t interested in you or your business, they’re reading the blog to discover the answer to a question they were Googling for.

So now we’ve established that your blog content should be about helping your audience (which builds rapport over time so they then trust you enough to buy from you), you can plan your posts around the questions they’re asking, and the pain points your business can help them solve.

Have a read of my blog about selecting the best blog post topics for further info on this.

Make sure you’re sharing and promoting your blogs

So, you’ve identified the best topics, you’ve written some amazing blogs and they don’t seem to be doing very much for your business. Website traffic is only slightly improved, you haven’t had any new enquiries and only 1 or 2 sign-ups to your email list.

What’s going on?

Let me turn that question around with another one – what are you doing to attract people to read your blogs?

Your audience can’t read a blog they don’t know exists, and Google won’t rank a blog highly until enough people have read it and given signals back to Google that the blog is high quality and worth sharing in search results. This means you have to do some work to get these blogs read and reap the marketing benefits from them.

Share them on social media, a lot! Sharing once as you post it isn’t enough, you need to be sharing often throughout the month, every month. Share on multiple platforms too – remember your audience will be hanging out in different places online, so make sure you’ve got as many of them covered as you can manage.

Put the links in your email newsletters. Your existing customers will still find this content useful and wish to read it, so let them know it’s there and invite them to share the link with people they think would find it helpful too.

Consider dropping links into Quora and Reddit answers, forum responses, etc. Just be careful with this tactic, only drop the link as part of a helpful response where it does add further information/help. If the blog doesn’t add anything of value, it’s considered spam to link to it.

Get marketing support for your business blog

Getting the strategy right for blogs, creating and sharing them can take a lot of time and effort, so consider outsourcing some or all of the process to a trusted professional that can take care of it for you.

Whether it’s a marketing consultant to help you identify topics and pain points to write about, a content writer to create the blogs for you, or a social media marketer to share them effectively (or a content marketing specialist that does everything!); getting professional support can make all the difference in having a successful blog for your business.

If I can support you with blogging for your business, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, I’d love to help.