An Effective Way To Attract New Business

A good blog engages its readers. If you are a small business, why should you want to engage readers, or even have a blog in the first place?

In our other blogs we discuss how getting found is the stepping stone to building trust with prospective customers, which in turn leads to new business. Blogs provide that familiarity that creates a quality enquiry, as shown by this statistic:

‍70% of consumers would rather learn about a company from a blog post rather than an advert.

Instead of taking a sales-first approach to customer interaction, blogs give you a direct way to speak to different customer groups, according to their needs, wants or general interests. In other words, blogs allow your customers to filtrate your offering to the market place according to them.  

What sort of actual, real world results can regular blogging produce? To start, blogs lead visitors to your website to interact with the content.  

It’s a more experiential relationship than simply reading a newspaper.

Visitors feel connected when they are reading something that feels valuable and relevant to them. That relevance can generate natural curiosity to guide them to dig a little deeper into either your other blog content, or the meaty parts of your website such as your case studies, portfolios or services.  

What we would recommend is that you take proactive action to ensure prospective customers get the choices put in front of them. This simple text link that goes to our main blog page is a perfect example. It’s low effort, direct, descriptive and relevant to this article.  

As mentioned earlier the blog landscape has changed a great deal in the last few years, with todays blogs focused around specific topics and written for targeted audiences rather than a broad spectrum.

So to widen the reach of your blogging, you need to maximize engagement. Here’s how:

1. Blog Longer

Blog posts are longer than they were in the past, with a large majority in the range of 2000-3000 words. Bloggers used to keep posts short for SEO benefits, but now we can include all the relevant and specific keywords in longer articles that are more subject-specific.

Today readers prefer longer posts – so here’s two ways to adopt to this need:

• You need to think differently about your topics
• You could take three separate posts and put them together
  
  

2. Keep Your Content Focused

Bloggers used to write about themselves, experiences, and ideas. However, content through your blogs must be targeted to one specific audience if you want to capitalise on having your blogs contribute to getting found on search engines.

Here’s a few more tips on what ‘content focused’ blogging actually means:

• If you provide high-value information that helps, you’ll get engagement

• A good blog focuses on the reader, not the writer
• Offer advice, tips, how-to content, and other helpful content
• Research your reader to find out what they need help with
  
  

3. Engage on Social Media, not Your Blog

In the past, bloggers focused on getting comments. The focus has shifted from the blogging platform to social media, whereby blogs have become linked and primarily used for keyword rankings.

Here’s why Social works:

• With social media, anyone can see your readers engage with your content

• Today’s strategy is to promote your content on social media and direct audiences to it, harnessing both platforms
• When a new piece is published, you can spread the word on different sites

• Some tricks to help your efforts on social media include:

1. Grow connections and comment and interact with their content

1. Connect with influencers

1. Let them know the value they’ll receive

1. Ask a question to start interaction

1. Mix It up with Multimedia

When blogs first started, most were text-based. Today’s blogs include other types of multimedia content. It’s easier than ever to embed multimedia content and people love it!

Types of content include:

• Videos – Many bloggers share videos with a short description. As engagement can increase by 94% with a video, why not include one? If you are stuck for ideas…quite literally turn your blog into a video. Then, transcript that video directly into a text-based blog to accompany it!
• Visual Content – It can be an infographic, quote, chart, diagram, etc
• Audio Content – Podcasts and other audio content which might be accompanied by a transcript to

In summary, how can we make the Most out of Blogging Today?

The blogging world today is much more focused on the audience

• Focus on the problems, questions, or concerns
• Create a two-way communication with your audience
• Building this kind of relationship takes time
• You need to write and publish regularly
• The work you put in at the beginning pays off a great deal over the course of a few years

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