Tips for a Successful Blog Strategy
As a business owner you will time and time again hear about how good SEO (search engine optimisation) help your website rank high when potential customers search for products or services just like those you have to offer. Product based businesses are lucky in that product descriptions allow for use of relevant keywords and search terms, not to forget that regularly updating their site with new products will make sure their website stays fresh and relevant - all factors truly appreciated by Google!
So what can you as a rider, trainer or service based business owner do to make sure your website is kept up to date? We want to keep things simple and focus on this one thing: Keeping an up-to-date blog or news section on your website. Its a proven way to get traffic to your website and is a great way to increase credibility!
IN SHORT, A BLOG HELPS TO:
Increase your SEO and make it easier for people to find you online.
Humanise your business and foster your audience's trust by giving back to them with useful content.
Create evergreen content that can be reused on other platforms such as your social media and therefore save you time.
Produce content that your audience want to share, leading new people to find your business.
Establish you as an expert in your industry as you can talk about what you know most about and show off your insider tips and tricks!
Whether you are a blogging newbie who wants to start as they mean to go on or you're an old hand who wants to up their game and make blogging more seamless, read our tips and become a blogging boss!
1. Start a list of ideas and inspiration and keep adding to it all the time
It's so helpful to have a wealth of content ideas saved up for when you have some spare time to sit down and write them. Adding to this list every time you see something that sparks an idea for a blog post means that you won't forget those perfect nuggets of inspiration
2. Write about things that anticipate the need for your services or products
Come up with ideas for what people might be searching before they search for your business. For example, if you are a company who manufacture products to soothe and relax horses muscles, write an article about the "5 Best Ways to Get Your Horse to Stretch out After Training" or something similar. This way you are getting people to your site who might not even know they want your product but convert to paying customers once they've explored your site after reading the blog post.
3. Produce helpful content for your audience
You want your audience to see your blog as somewhere they go for content that benefits them. Not only will this mean they start to trust you and value your business as one that cares about its customers, but it will increase brand awareness as your audience will be more inclined to share blog content that has genuinely been useful to them.
4. Plan your blog posts in advance
A long term plan is essential to taking out the stress from blogging and ensuring that you are consistently posting even in busier periods where it might not feel like your main priority. 3 months in advance is a great time frame to stick to, this allows you to take into account all of the approaching holidays and events within your industry and strategise your content around them!
5. Keep track of your analytics
By noting which of your blog posts your audience engaged with most you can produce content in the same vein in the future that will hopefully be just as popular with your audience. There is no point wasting your time writing lots of content about a topic that hasn't performed well in the past!
6. Categorise your blog postsOnce someone is on your website this helps them to find more articles on topics that they want to read about. For example this blog post comes under "marketing" as blogging is part of digital marketing strategy and is linked to SEO strategy.
So if you want to learn more these topics and find blog posts related to this one, you can look at the posts within the "marketing" category on our blog. Having four or five broad categories of blog posts also helps you to come up with new ideas and you will find that lots of smaller topics fit into them.
7. Format your blog posts in readable layouts
Breaking up your text into numbered lists, small paragraphs or bullet points is a great way to make your blog posts more attractive for your audience to read.
Walls of text look impenetrable and online you are competing with lots of sources to hook the reader and make it your blog post that they read. It makes information much easier to digest as it sections it into parts that someone can understand from a quick glance and decide if your post is worth reading.
8. Link to other pages on your site or other blog posts
By linking to other parts of your site you are encouraging the reader to stay on your site and explore more, hopefully converting them into a paying customer. Likewise, linking to other blog posts increases the chances that the reader will spend longer on your site, learning about your business and building their trust and familiarity with you.
On top of this benefit, linking to other posts boosts your credibility in Google's eyes and it increases your SEO, this means you'll appear higher in search results and people are more likely to find your website.
9. Give your blog posts titles that are searchable
To help your blog posts show up in google results, try to name them something that answers exactly what someone would search in google to find a blog post like yours. For example, use words like "tips" or short, punchy rhetorical questions instead of vague titles about your "experience with" or "thoughts on".
If your post was about a certain event or experience, think about the thing that is most searchable from that blog post and use it as your title; whether that is the name of the place or the activity that the post is about.
10. Do small tasks at once
It is much more efficient to do smaller tasks all at once rather than trying to create a whole blog post all in one go. Dedicate a certain amount of time to brain storming ideas for posts, then a separate amount of time to writing them and do the same thing with creating thumbnails, graphics, photography and scheduling them on your site.
