Blogging. It’s a bit passe, isn’t it? Do people even bother reading these days when there is TikTok? Honestly, your business blog needs to work on many levels. From attracting people to your website in the first place right down to reassuring them that you’re the best brand for the job. If you want to elevate your brand, here is everything you need to know for a successful blogging strategy.
Step 1 – Define your brand voice
This means putting together a clear and consistent tone. Your blog (and all the content on your website for that matter), needs to ooze personality. Not necessarily yours, depending on the kind of business you run, but it does need to give a sense of being relatable.
Take this blog. You’ll get a sense of my voice and personality through it. In fact, I’ve had replies to my Thursday Brew emails that people are reading them in my lovely Yorkshire accent. As though I’m sat next to them taking them through that week’s subject. That’s the tone of voice.
For your business, your brand voice should reflect your values and connect with your customers. If you’re not a one-person show, this means the voice of the brand so that it doesn’t matter who is writing the content, it reads like one person alone has been involved in it. Otherwise, it all gets a bit confusing and that can subtly breed some distrust.
It’s not necessarily about being whacky or disruptive but reflecting the tone of the business in your words. Recently, I came across a website that spoke so deeply to me that I switched preferences on where I was going to buy a product. The words on the screen made me want to make this founder my new best friend. That’s a powerful tone of voice and that’s what you’re looking to achieve.
You don’t want to write for everyone. You definitely don’t want to please everyone. But you do want to write for that person who you’d love to work with and make them feel like your new best friend.
Step 2 – Get a keyword strategy on the go
For a successful blogging strategy, you also need a solid keyword strategy. That doesn’t mean shoehorning the keyword willy-nilly. But instead, be considerate about what keywords your dream customer is likely to use.
The easiest and best starting point is to look at the questions your customers are asking. Then use this to flow outwards of related keywords and questions. Can you honestly say you’ve answered all possible questions about your business and service? Probably not. Start here and you’ll have a cracking foundation for a successful blogging strategy.
Step 3 – Make it consistent
You’ll want to be creating consistently good content on a consistent basis. If you’re truly looking to boost your blogging strategy then you’ll need to make sure you or your team have the time to maintain the cadence of blogs.
That might be weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Make sure the time is available to create, edit and upload the blogs. Start slow and build in more time as you see the process building. This way, you’re not setting yourself up for failure with an unrealistic blogging schedule.
Step 4 – Repurpose the content
Blogging takes time. It takes time to research and create a decent blog. The last thing you want to do is post and run. Instead, break your blog up into other content. One blog can become a newsletter, social media posts, scripts for videos, a podcast and more. Each of these pieces of content helps promote your blog and therefore your business.
A blog should be part of a bigger content ecosystem and flow through into your content strategy. Blogs need to work alongside other content to get their full impact. Make sure you have a solid system in place.
Step 5 – Keep improving it
Blogging isn’t a once-and-done activity. You need to go back and keep making it better. The world changes, tech changes and your audience needs will change. This means you’ll need to keep updating what you’re doing with your blogs.
For the best possible blogging strategy, you want to make sure all of your blogs best reflect your business and not have them sitting there gathering dust.
The importance of business blogging
In the age of AI, having a good quality blog is more important than ever. If you want to stand out above your competition then you need to show off why you’re the best choice for your audience. Remember that story about how I read a blog and instantly changed my mind on a product? That’s the power of a blog. You can demonstrate how you are the right business for your customers.
But churning out blogs on a wish and prayer (and because someone on the internet said you should) isn’t the best idea for your business. You need a strong foundation behind it. You need to know why you’re creating a blog in the first place.
Setting goals for your business blog
Before you even put finger to keyboard, you need to know what you want to achieve from your blogs. Do you want to get more organic traffic to your website? Raise brand awareness? Or get more sales?
If you know what you want the end outcome to be you can then measure the success of your blogging campaigns. And don’t forget, you can have different blogs serving different purposes.
Let’s say you want to raise brand awareness for your business, then you’ll have lots of lovely thought-leadership blogs. These will be long and insightful. They’ll probably have data and research that you’ve gathered yourself. Or they will have academic research that you use to argue your unique position on the subject.
This looks very different from the kinds of blogs you’ll write to bring in organic traffic and convert into leads or sales. And, in turn, these kinds of blogs are very different again from the ones you write for warm leads who want reassurance that your product or service is right for them.
So when you’re setting goals for your blogging strategy, make sure you truly understand what you’re trying to achieve and how you’ll achieve it. Plus, you’ll need to be realistic about what you can do with your time and resources. When you have all this in place, you can create an effective and successful blogging strategy.
Identifying your target audience
Alright, you’ve already heard me mention the whole “ideal customer” a few times but what exactly does this look like and why does it matter?
You want to get your blog in front of the eyes of people who want to read it. And, for those people to potentially want to buy your product or services. You need to understand who they are and what their problems are. Then you can angle your blogs to really reach out to this person.
Let’s say you’re a coach. You know that you mostly work with women in the mid-40s. So you can assume that they are ambitious, going through significant changes and want to re-centre on who they are as a person. When you write a blog, you can look at how the subject will impact them rather than say, a man of a similar age. Their needs, outlooks and experiences are different.
By understanding these needs, experience, and outlooks, you can tweak how you approach a subject to better meet their needs. And this all starts by understanding your ideal customer. Go out and talk to them, ask questions, listen carefully to their answers and the words they use. Look back through customer emails and see what they are saying. Then bring all of this back through into your blog content.
You can also use this research to feed into keyword tools and bring it through into your keyword research. But a good blog strategy starts from good listening.
Consider the format
A blog doesn’t have to be a bunch of words on a page. It can have infographics, video, audio, and interactive content. The format for your blog is yours to play around with. If you have the time and resources, go back and update old blogs to bring them into your new formats.
Again, understand what is worth your time to create. It needs to take you closer to your goal so make sure you don’t get distracted with shiny, pretty things or that you can get outside help to make it happen.
Writing a basic blog can be the quickest and easiest way to get content out there. Working in sprints and campaigns can help get the blog published but also keep its content fresh. You can start with a simple format and add to it later. In fact, this is something I recommend on my Blog Confidence course.
There is nothing worse than a blog sitting in draft format for months because it’s not “perfect”. It never will be perfect. Publish what’s good enough and perfect it later.
Let’s promote your business blog content
Creating great content is only half the battle. To attract readers and grow your audience, you need to effectively promote and distribute your blog content.
Here are some ideas:
- Share on social media: share the blog itself or use snippets for social copy. Think about how you can use different graphics to help support your blog promotion. Carousels, PDFs, infographics, videos and audio clips can all help.
- Email marketing: promote your blog through your newsletter or use it as the basis for your main newsletter content. If someone is on your mailing list, they already like what you do and want to hear more.
- Collaborate with influencers: don’t be afraid to ask for input from others in your industry. You might ask for a quote or guest post with them. Putting yourself forward as a podcast guest can help your blog reach a new audience.
- Guest blogging: writing guest posts for other reputable blogs in your industry can help you reach a wider audience and build relationships. Make sure to include a link back to your own blog in your guest posts.
- Paid advertising: you can put money behind your blogs and promote them on LinkedIn, Meta and Google. This is a nice way to target specific readers and build brand awareness.
Your blog is an ongoing process, not something to pick up for a couple of weeks and then forget about. If you really want to make it a focus of your content marketing then you need to give it the time and effort to promote as well as to create the initial content.
Measuring the success of your blog
You need to measure to know whether or not you have a successful blogging strategy. And if you’ve set clear goals for your blog, you’ll need to know if you’re heading in the right direction. What you measure depends on your goal but here are some metrics you might want to consider:
- Traffic: the number of visitors to your blog, as well as the sources of traffic (organic search, social media, referrals, etc.). This will help you understand how people are finding your blog.
- Engagement: look at metrics like average time on page, engagement rate, and social shares. This will help you understand how much people are engaging with your blog. You might also want to add a heat mapping service to your website which shows you how far down the page people scroll and what they click on.
- Conversions: Track the number of leads or sales generated from your blog. Set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics or other analytics tools to measure whether your blog is part of that sales journey.
- SEO performance: Monitor your blog’s rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted keywords. You can do this through Google Search Console or other services.
It’s not enough to make a pretty spreadsheet of these metrics, you also need to take action. Use the metrics to adjust your strategy and take advantage of opportunities.
SEO and business blogging
When you optimise your content for search, it helps bring more new eyes to your website. You need to make sure the keywords are right for your business and audience. But it’s not solely about your words. SEO is a complex beast with so many opportunities.
Here’s a starter of things to look at:
- Keywords: make sure your blog has relevant keywords. You’ll want these in the title, sub-headings and throughout the text.
- On-page optimisation: This means making sure your blog is worthy of reading. You’ve got good sub-headings and is easy to read.
- Link building: getting other websites to link back to your blog can help build its authority. There are several ways of building backlinks but start with building relationships with people first and be reciprocal.
- Mobile optimisation: don’t forget to check how your blog looks on mobile as plenty of people will read it from their phones.
There is too much to say about SEO on a single blog but my best advice is to keep going back to your blog and seeing how you can improve it.
Creating a successful blogging strategy
There is a lot to consider when creating a successful blogging strategy. It needs careful planning, consistent effort and a deep understanding of who you want to buy your products. But blogging also needs you to understand the purpose and goals so that you’re not wasting your time.
Blogs have immense potential for your business if you do them right. That means not simply relying on AI to churn them out for you but to make your work stand out against a sea of mediocrity.
For more help with blogging check out my Blog Confidence Course. An 8-week course that takes you through every element of blogging, with real feedback and support for you and your business.