Creating a successful blog
Follow our tips on creating a successful blog, whether your blog is for your business purposes or just a bit of fun.
Blogging goals
Before you start writing a blog you need to decide on what your blogging goals are; what would you like to achieve from your blog? This could be just one thing or a number of things such as; increase my business brand awareness, increase traffic to my website to rank higher in Google, to connect with other bloggers who have similar interests to me, to make money from my blog or it could simply be because you enjoy doing it.
Now you need to decide how many times a week you want to blog, our suggestion would be once or twice a week because if your blog isn’t regularly updated you will lose that connection with your visitors. People like to see fresh content on a regular basis which will also help with increasing your rankings in search engines (include those pesky little keywords).
Have you decided on what to blog about? If the aim of your blog is to increase your brand awareness and traffic to your website then we would suggest writing articles on topics that relate to your business. Give your visitors something interesting to read that they will want to share to their friends. If your blog is purely for fun then the choice is yours!
Whatever your goals may be, make sure you write these down and stick to them
Once you are 100% on your goals and you have posted a few articles then a good idea will be to analyze your data. Use Google Analytics to provide information on the number of visitors to your blog, what your most popular blogs are and how they are finding your blog. Using this information you can then concentrate on how you can increase these visits and what you need to work on.
Promoting your blog
Once you have created your blog and written a few articles you will need to promote it. People will not be aware of your blog unless you spread the word. The best way to promote your blog is via social media. Post your articles on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social media networks that you have accounts for. The best way to do this is to schedule posts through social media platforms such as Sprout Social. For each blog post that you write, schedule for this to go out at different times on different days as posting a link to your article just once will not be enough to get traffic to it, remind your audience that it is there.
Create content that your audience will want to share, this is a way of increasing visitors to your blog. Make your content interesting, use videos, infographics and images. Join community groups where potential customers will be, join in and create discussions and build up trust with other members.
Guest blogging on a reputable blog is a great way at driving traffic to your blog, this way you can get back-links to your blog which will drive traffic and help in search rankings.
For other ways to boost your blog have a read of Metachick’s blog – How can I make my blog brilliant?
Creating content for your website or blog can take time so if you need some advice and guidance we are here to help. Contact us for more information.