Do you own or manage a business blog? If so, then you already understand the importance of content marketing. Consumers who land on your website are more likely to subscribe to your email list, buy something from your online store and engage with your brand on social media if you have tons of valuable content available.
Consider this: 75% of internet users say they read blogs regularly. Businesses without in-depth, exciting content related to their niche tend to suffer and fade out quickly after they metaphorically open their doors. If you want people to come to your website, you have to create top-notch content. There are specific tactics you can implement to make your content marketing strategy more effective.
Today we are going to take a look at four tips you should keep in mind if you want to run a successful business blog.
1. Create goal-focused content.
When you create articles for consumers, do you have a goal? If not, you’re missing out on one of the most valuable benefits of content marketing. When you write an article, make sure to include information your audience will find valuable. However, you need to also think about what you want them to do when they are done reading your post.
If your goal is to get them to subscribe to your email list, you may want to put a call to action at the bottom of the post that urges the reader to subscribe for more great articles. If that’s not enough, you could consider giving them a discount on their purchase at your online store if they subscribe first. If this is the case, you can use banners and pop-ins that let consumers know that the offer is available.
The goals of your readers matter, too. When you’re writing for a niche audience, make sure you research their pain points, interests and demographics, and write like you’re a helpful friend. For example, if you write a piece of content called “How to Build Your First Website,” the article needs to adequately explain to readers how to build a website. If you don’t complete the promise offered in the headline, they will hesitate the next time your post shows up in their feed.
2. Diversify your platforms.
Blog posts are great, but where else are you creating content? Remember, everything from email to YouTube videos to good old-fashioned blog posts counts as proper content. If you want to reach your audience, you should create content for various platforms.
The best part about this tip is you can repurpose existing content to fit new platforms. Let’s say you wanted to repurpose your blog post on creating a website for new users. You can upload a video where you walk users through creating their website with a video tutorial that contains the same information as your blog post. This kind of content is considered extraordinarily shareable and will likely get more traction than a standard blog post.
3. Keep your existing content updated.
One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners make is they forget to update their old posts. There are plenty of reasons you should check your posts monthly and update them. First, when you make changes to your content slowly over time, it evolves as the times change, but the core stays the same.
If you decided to write an article about keeping your website secure in 2011, you would have a hard time updating it in 2020. When you start from scratch, you’ll find that much has changed, and your article could have provided readers with wrong, outdated information.
Your website search engine optimization (SEO) ranking can benefit from keeping your content up to date. Google crawlers will index your site regularly, and if you are making changes, there’s a good chance other people will use your article as a reference post. If the crawlers notice more backlinks to your post, this could result in a significant boost in your search engine ranking.
4. Track your analytics.
Finally, make sure you check your analytics on social media, email and on-site at least monthly. The more you know about your target audience and how they engage with your brand, the better chance you’ll have at creating successful content across all platforms.
For example, if you’re operating an online store about gardening, you may notice that your posts on vegetable gardening get quadruple the traffic of posts that focus on just flowers. You can use this analytics data to create content that mimics the success of your most popular posts. As your post quality and topics shift, you’ll discover new ways to grow your business and improve your content marketing strategy.