Blogging, A Powerful Tool For Your Business: Getting Started

Writing requires time. Especially when it comes to creating a compelling and original text, that will stick to the mind of your readers. Writing requires a range of skills, from creativity to the ability to organize information and building arguments. To be effective, writing needs to be nurtured.
Why on earth should then a business spend time on running a blog that will require a lot of writing?

The reasons are many, let’s dig into some of them!

Increase traffic to your website

A good blog helps you increase traffic to your website. Whenever you publish a post, you create a new page URL that can be ranked in search engines and discovered by people who didn’t’ know about your business before. Suppose you are a newborn cheese brand and you publish a post “How to prepare a great cheesecake”. Someone surfing the net might google “cheesecake”, land on your post and eventually prepare a delicious dessert. Wouldn’t this be a great way to advertise your amazing cheese brand? But this is not it, if published across your social media channels, your post can also be a reason for your social followers to go to your website. Remember, contrary to your website which is static, your blog is dynamic and gives you numerous opportunities to be found online!

Become a trustworthy actor in your field

A good blog helps you being perceived as a trustworthy actor in your field. Going back to the cheese story, what if besides publishing tasty recipes you also provide your readers with useful tips about how to store cheese? Or maybe you entertain them with interesting articles about the cheese making process? Through time, providing helpful information together with arising the curiosity of your readers will make you stand out from the crowd and gain the trust of your followers. Eventually, this will make you being perceived as a leader in your business field.

Increase the interaction with your potential customers

A good blog enables you to increase the interaction and to build a relation with your potential customers. Always check the comments section and give feedbacks to your readers. This is a great chance you have to engage with them and to reveal your brand personality! Is someone writing you that he/her has prepared a delicious cheesecake by following your recipe? Then, don’t miss this opportunity to thank your reader and encourage him/her to discover the other recipes on your blog!

There is no doubt that having a blog is a great investment for your business. So, how can you get started?

Here are three must-do activities for those on the verge of starting a blog:

• revise the mission and strength points of your business. These should be always clear in your mind, especially your unique value proposition. Starting from your UVP you will be able to set the right goals, to decide the most suitable writing style and, above all, to choose the best topics.
• take some time to see what your competitors are writing about. By saying so, I am not suggesting you to copy and paste their content but instead to read it carefully and understand what is done well, what could be done better and what could be done completely different to offer an additional value to your future readers. In other words, you should spend some time at looking at your competitors to get inspired, to understand the most popular topics and to develop new ones on which you can leverage to attract visitors.
• define the roles: who will pick the topics? Who is going to write and who’s going to publish the content? Who will analyze the performance of the blog? Especially when your business cannot afford to have a specialized copywriter, then tasks and responsibilities must be assigned since the very beginning. You want to run your blog in a systematic way, so that consistent and captivating content is published on a regular basis.

After having gone through these three preliminary steps (remember…do not cheat!) it’s finally time to choose the topics you are going to write about in your super blog.

Are you ready to brainstorm with your team? Remember, while focusing on this important activity, keep in mind the following factors:

• who’s your target? Are they students? Businesswomen? Businessmen? Full time moms? The content you are going to offer and its style will change a lot depending on who’s going to read it. Also remember, choose a tone of voice that mirrors your brand personality!
• what’s your target interested in? What does it need help with? How can you amaze it? Think of your blog as a tool that will entertain and make the life of your readers simpler. Talk about you only on few occasions.
• engage in keyword research: whenever your amazing brainstorming team comes up with a word topic, take some time to understand how many people are looking for it in search engines. Google keyword planner is a great instrument to do this. Remember: do not take anything for granted, a slightly different term can really make the difference for your post to perform better!
• how many times are you going to publish? Having a planned schedule will help you produce and publish your content on a regular basis.

There you have it, if you were planning on starting a blog these are the steps you should carefully follow to get started!