FAQs About Business Blogging

By now you’re probably one of the businesses that have realised that blogging is an essential component of your inbound marketing strategy.

If you haven’t started blogging, it’s time to catch up.

If your business does blog, how can you make sure that your strategy is competitive and keeps working for you well into 2020? Here are some questions that I hear a lot.

1. Does blogging really work?

Short answer, yeah.

Long answer, businesses that blog can expect to see 55% more website visitors. More website visitors = more leads. Whether your company is B2B  or B2C, regular bloggers will have the edge in bringing in new customers.

B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads per month than businesses who don’t, B2C companies get 88% more leads.

2. How often should I be blogging?

Top blogs share their content as much as less popular blogs, but the amount of content they produce is much more bountiful. The top ten ranked business blogs produce about 8 times more content than other blogs. The average blog posts 5 times per month, the top 10 blogs are posting 39 articles per month.

Posting once a week really isn’t enough. It’s ideal to be blogging daily. There are a few ways you can manage this. Creating an editorial calendar and assigning an hour each morning to blog can be an option. If you don’t have the time or resources to do this in house consider using a freelancer (we’re awesome).

3. How do I make my blogs interesting?

While your business is interesting to you, you have to write about what will be useful and relevant to your customers. Nobody likes people who talk about themselves too much.

I’ve had businesses ask me many times ‘will people really want to read my blog? My company doesn’t sell the worlds most exciting product/service’. My answer is definitely yes. If your business wasn’t interesting to people, they would have no need to buy from you.

Opening up your topic can help make your subject more interesting. Rather than having to make your content specifically about your product, think about what is important to the average customer in your industry.

If your product or service enables people to do something. For example, a finance company allows people to buy something, then write about the end result. Homebase do not write blogs about their actual products, they have endless how-to articles on ‘how to create the perfect lawn’, ‘how to put up wallpaper perfectly’ etc. Sure deodorant has twenty articles about the different types of sweat you may encounter in your life — from sweating after eating spicy food to getting sweaty hands when you’re nervous. Anyone who panics and Googles ‘how to stop sweating on a first date’ — will probably come across a company like Sure.

Whatever your industry is, throw yourself into it! Write about your industry, not just your product. If toilet paper companies can get blog subscribers, then so can you.

4. What type of blogs should I write?

The most popular blog content of 2015 has been how-to articles, lists, ‘what’ posts, ‘why’ posts and info-graphics. I can confirm from my own work experience that blog titles that contain a number, such as ‘Ten ways to make’ or ‘5 reasons to’ are consistently more successful.

5. How can I tell if people are going to search for my blog?

Seeing as your blog is hoping to attract attention from people using search engines, it’s a good idea to incorporate themes and topics that are being searched regularly.

You can get insights on what people are searching for through google.com/trends. It’s pretty nifty.

6. Why will blogging help my SEO?

Search engines are all about the searcher, not the one being searched for. Search engines care about providing the searcher with content that totally fixes the query they had and is as relevant as possible. To do this they prioritise websites that have fresh content full of relevant ‘long tail’ keywords or phrases. Blogging hits these two birds with one stone. Blogging allows you to regularly update your website whilst including content that matches what people are searching for.

Another reason that blogging is so amazing for SEO is because search engines prioritise content that is highly shared. People may be a bit ‘meh’ about sharing your services page but write a ‘how to’ article that fixes a problem they’ve had for a while and they’ll be sharing your URL to all their friends.

7. Why is nobody reading my blog?

Feeling a little disheartened that you started to blog and the crowds didn’t come flocking in? Although blogging is healthy for your website traffic, hoards of committed readers don’t come overnight.

Creating a well-read blog takes time, dedication and love. You will have to build up your SEO presence, build up regular subscribers and build up a social media following.

Yes this takes real work and you may not see the results immediately but it slowly builds up into a hive of attention for your business. Marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

If you’ve been blogging regularly for a while and you’re still getting low amounts of traffic make sure you’re regularly sharing your content on social media if that doesn’t work it may be time to revert back to question 3 (how do I make my blogs interesting?)

Make sure that your blog is easily shareable, if you’re a WordPress user there are tonnes of plugins that can help you out with this. Subscriber buttons will get people coming back again and again.

8. Is it all about video now?

YES, social media with videos in them boost views by 48%. Creating vlogs (the internet speak for video blogs) is perhaps a little more time consuming than writing blogs, but certainly more effective. People’s attention spans are dropping and video is a great way to engage an audience. If you are going to create vlogs, keep them short. 1–3 minutes is enough.

If you want to go more in-depth on a subject then consider making a podcast. The way people consume information and media is changing, the more avenues you pursue the more people you will reach.