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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
In summary, how can we make the Most out of Blogging Today?
The blogging world today is much more focused on the audience
Website Tips, Website Tricks and all things in between!