How to Use Your Blog to Promote Your Business

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Most entrepreneurs know the importance of blogging for business. But are you using your blog effectively to promote your business and increase your ROI?

Promoting your business includes the ability to produce and distribute quality content that aligns with your overall marketing and business goals. Brands, retailers and businesses are now becoming publishers in order to reach audiences, market their products and services, and increase revenue. For most of us — that means publishing a blog on our business website.

In 2015, HubSpot reported that B2B companies that blogged 11+ times per month had almost 3X more traffic than those blogging 0-1 times per month. They also reported that B2C companies that blogged 11+ times per month got more than 4X as many leads as those that blog only 4-5 times per month. But — are you using your blog effectively in order to promote your business, generate leads and grow your business? Below are six ways to use your blog to promote your business.

1. Create an Attractive Online Platform: In order to develop your blog into a workhorse for your business, you’ll want to put some effort into making sure it looks attractive and will appeal to your ideal customers or clients.

Invest in good hosting and a premium theme and put effort into making sure your blog looks professional. If your blog does not look good, visitors will not want to return and stay for a while.

2. Consistently Create Useful Content: Publish content that revolves around your business. Whatever problem your business is solving, your blog posts should also be able to solve some of those same problems too.

Your blog should illustrate to potential clients that you are an expert in your area of business. Your content should be useful to potential clients. You should also be sure to create your content on a consistent basis. Use a blog editorial calendar to set up a schedule and content for each week.

3. Create an Interview Series. One of the most effective blogging tactics I’ve used in order to grow my business is to interview thought-leaders, entrepreneurs and influencers for my blog. Having an ongoing interview series will give you the opportunity to reach out to those that you know in your industry or those in an industry that you’re desperately trying to get a foothold in.

People love talking about themselves and always seem to jump at a chance to be profiled and featured online. Publish an interview series on your blog and keep the new relationships going offline.

4. Use Calls to Action: At the end of each blog post — inform your readers of your calls to action. Perhaps there’s a new sale, a free trial, a discount, a new service or a time-based offer that you want them to take action on. You might want your readers to join your email list or even share your post on social media.

After reading your blog post your reader should want to click your call-to-action, get to a landing page and complete a form with their information to subsequently become a potential lead for you to convert into a client or customer.

It’s important for you to capture your visitor information in order to keep them in your online ecosystem for possible business opportunities.

5. Create an Email List: According to KissMetrics, email has nearly three times as many users as Facebook and Twitter combined. When you can provide your blog readers with valuable content and tack on an offer or service upgrade related to your business, your emails become powerful marketing tools for very little cost.

An email newsletter gives businesses the power to reach customers in a place most people visit every day ─ their inbox.

6. Use Social Media: Every small business and brand should have its own social media strategy. But before you snap, post, tweet or share, plan out what kind of content you’ll be posting, how it will support your marketing goals.

Tag other people and organizations in your content to extend your reach, follow thought-leaders, corporations, individuals to build up your following and notoriety. Your content should be audience-focused and professional. More and more business leaders, entrepreneurs and freelancers are using blogs to increase income and generate business growth.

Although blogging requires the discipline of researching, creating and writing information of value, it’s a relatively easy, inexpensive way to enhance your marketing efforts, drive traffic to your site, and attract more prospective clients.

Image via Unsplash

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