FYI Friday | Building up Your Business through Blogging
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Blogging has taken the internet by storm, and it has become a formidable tool for businesses to establish their authority online. With approximately?500 million blogs?online, however, it can be difficult to capture your audience's attention. Fortunately, there are plenty of winning tactics you can use to win more customers through your company’s blog. But first, it’s important to understand why your audience reads your blog and what makes it such a powerful tool.
Why do your customers read your brand's blog?
While statistics prove time and again that having a blog is essential for any brand, they don’t tell you just how much your audience relies on these blogs. Not only do approximately?77%?of internet users admit to reading blogs, but internet users in the U.S. spend?three times longer?reading blogs than they do emails.
That's because internet users rely on these blogs for several things, including:
These factors drive consumers to your blog, but it's your job to hold their attention and keep them coming back for more.
5 winning tactics for using your blog to attract more customers
A blog is one of the most?powerful marketing tools?you have at your disposal. Blogs are proven to captivate customers, establish trust, and close sales. If you're trying to build your customer base, these five winning tactics for attracting more customers through your blog will help:
1. Use your blog to inform the reader, not sell to them
Your blog is an opportunity to provide readers with valuable content. Your goal should be to share information that helps them solve problems or answer questions, rather than to?sell them on your product or service.
Internet users don't usually stumble upon a blog for no reason; they intentionally enter a specific search term or question into the search engine to find relevant information on a topic or to seek solutions to a problem. Make sure you are providing those answers or solutions.
2. Be personable
Unless you have an audience of highly knowledgeable professionals looking for encyclopedia-style content, you don't want to get too technical with your readers.
Instead, your blog should be friendly, approachable, and authentic. Use your blog to provide your audience with the information they need in a way they understand, not in the way you do. It should also be a way to connect with your audience on a deeper level. They want to know that?you care about your customers?enough to share valuable information with them, even if you are not profiting from it.
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3. Invite guest bloggers
To strengthen or diversify your blog, consider inviting guest bloggers to contribute content. Guest bloggers are often experts in a specific area of interest, which means the writing they produce for you will be high-quality and valuable.
This is a great way to provide your audience with more information than you could produce alone, and can further build trust among your readers as well. So, don't be afraid to give your guest bloggers the byline they deserve.
4. Feature user-generated content
User-generated content is material that is created by your audience. This can include:
Each of these pieces of content can then be?repurposed for your blog?to help you engage with your audience. For example, if you're selling a product, you could publish a series of blog posts featuring customer-generated photos of the product in use. If you're a service business, you could publish a series of blog posts featuring customer?video reviews.
This type of content will show current customers that you care about what they have to say, and it will give you more credibility with potential new customers.
5. Maximize your reach with SEO best practices
Simply creating content and posting it to your blog doesn’t mean your target audience will be able to find it. To get your blog in front of the right audience, you need to?use SEO best practices?to optimize your content for the search engines.
Optimizing your content requires using keywords, tagging your posts, and adding relevant meta information to each post so Google and other search engines can sort/index it and get it in front of the right people.
7 tips for using your blog to increase traffic, leads, and sales
It takes a lot of effort to create a blog that drives traffic. You can spend lots of time and money creating amazing content, but it won’t be worthwhile if you don’t have any readers. Growing your blog requires more than just good content; you have to follow a strategy to grow your platform. Here are seven ways to increase traffic to your blog to?generate more leads and sales:
In today’s digital age, a blog is one of the most powerful ways to reach consumers. By incorporating the seven tips outlined above, you can optimize your blog content to increase your reach and build a larger audience. As a result, you will have more opportunities to generate sales.