Blogs 101

Blogging is a great way to inform current and potential customers about topics that are relevant to your business.  Regardless of the type of business you have, there are always topics to cover that fans of your business would be interested in reading about.  Maybe you’re a HVAC company blogging about a reminder to clean your air filters, or an Auto Repair Shop blogging about ways to make your car last longer- point is, there is always something to say.

Using Blogs

So you may be asking how often you need to blog? Once a month, once a week, once a day? The best way to answer that question is- The more you can do the better. If you’re producing relevant, valuable content, people will be able to find your posts and older posts in search results and social media. So the more you have the more likely people are to stumble across it.

If used correctly, blogging can:

• Drive Traffic to your website
• Increase your Search Engine Optimization
• Make you an industry leader of information
• Develop better customer relationships.

When blogging, always include links back to pages on your website where readers may want to go to next. This knocks out two birds with one stone so-to-speak as it drives traffic to your site and helps with SEO. Using specific keywords throughout your blog, listing categories and topics is also another great way to increase your business’ SEO. Comments from customers will stay on your blog and be visible by anyone else reading the blog whereas on Facebook and Twitter that comment eventually gets washed up in the constant posting required on those sites.

Steps to Increase Blog Readers

Writing a blog is much more enjoyable and rewarding when you know that people are actually reading it and there are a number of ways to increase the readership on your blog.

• Share it on Social Media
• Add a sign up form
• Post consistently

Sharing your recently published blogs on Facebook and Twitter is absolutely key. Not only will your blog be seen by your current customers who like or follow your page, it gives them the option to share it, like it or retweet it making it visible to your customer’s friends as well. This can really add up when most Facebook users have over 300 friends and 200 twitter followers on average. 

Finally, adding a sign-up form either as a pop-up or a link they can click wouldn’t hurt. It’s become common for blogs to have a sign up form and many users expect to see one.

What to Avoid

Many beginning bloggers will get caught up in some bad habits. A few things to keep in mind when starting a blog

• Don’t have auto-loading music or video
  • Make them click play if they want to watch or listen
• Don’t use a dark background with light text        
  
  • Reading online is harder on our eyes already
• Don’t plagiarize        
  
  • May seem obvious but produce original content              
    • Even pictures online, its plagiarism if you didn’t ask for permission.
• When adding links, avoid using “click here”       
  
  • Instead, incorporate keywords that are relevant to the link.

The End Goal

Successful Blogs will have people coming to them for information regarding the industry your business is in. It will include relevant content, include website links, be shared on social media, and be updated as frequently as possible to continue to engage readers and gain new ones.

If you are ready to begin, learn how to set up your Blog below.

How to Start: 4 Steps

• Step 1: Decide where to write blog and set up an account by following set up instructions
  
  • Wordpress.com and Blogger.com are two very popular blogging sites
• Step 2: Begin Blogging. Follow advice above
• Step 3: Post on Social Media about your new blog
• Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 often!