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Blogging For Business

Written by Arnold Shields | Jan 27, 2011 6:59:54 AM

Blogging is one of your most important internet marketing tools. It enables you:

  • to build trust and reputation through articles that help others and show your knowledge of your products and services.
  • find niches in your industry that your competitors have missed.
  • build content on your website instead of having just a website of just 5-10 pages, your website will have hundreds of pages (over time of course)
  • Google loves Blogs - Google wants to show the freshest, most up to date content of your site. By blogging on a regular basis, Google will index your site on a more regular basis.
  • generate more traffic and referrals - blogging will generate more traffic to your site.

Very few business websites in Australia include a blog and thus you can make a massive impact in your industry by using a blog to your advantage. This will change quickly over the next few years and it is important that you get started now.

What is a blog?

A blog is a web page made up of usually short, frequently updated posts that are arranged chronologically—like a what's new page or a journal. To see some examples of blog posts have a look at our site: www.dolmanbateman.com.au/blog/

Your blog posts are generally between 200 and 500 words discussing any topic related to your business.

Your website offers you to the opportunity to find people who are interested in what you are selling, but they often do not use the same language or terms that you are using or they are looking at a solution to their problem.

The primary reason that you will blog is to get ranked on Google.If you publish a regularly updated, well-written blog on your company's site, it will show up more often in search engine results.

Blogs are fantastic at getting ranking for long tail keywords (3 words and over search phrases). Blogs offer you the opportunity to target every keyword in your industry without your site being overloaded and the overall message being lost.

If you notice on our site,  only the latest 6 posts are shown, but we have over 130 blogs posts on different subjects.

What Should You Write About?

You should write about every product and service that your business offers, what problems it solves, how to articles, top 10 mistakes, 10 best practices. If you are selling products talk about each product, talk about the brands etc.

One of the great benefits of blogging is that it is cumulative, an article that you write will continue doing its job for years. You can also use your blog posts as material for your email newsletters - making them very easy to write.

Many people do not blog because they are worried their writing isn't good enough. Don't worry. You will become better as time goes on and you can always change your articles latter on if you find a mistake. Some articles will get no visitors or interest and some will find a niche in your market that you didn't know existed.

Your blogs will form a part of your sales process, nuturing your potential clients, educating them, showing them that you are the right company for the job.

Blog Search Engine Optimisation

Your blogs must be optimised for search engines to get the maximum benefit, so they should ensure the following contains the primary keywords for that post:

  • Title
  • Description
  • URL
  • Alt Text on any photos.

We usually try to include a photo in all our posts to make it a bit more visually appealing, but you can also includes videos.

Summary

  • Start a blog in your business now.
  • Write articles that help people and provide them with the information that they need to make a decision.
  • Write articles on a regular basis (3 times a week is ideal but once a week is great).
  • SEO optimise your articles.
  • Read your Google Analytics statistics.