Blog_1.jpgWhen writing a business blog, take off your hat as a business owner or marketing manager and try to think like a magazine publisher. The goal of your business blog should be to publish articles that are valuable and non-promotional, much in the way a column or an article in an industry magazine would be. Also, think about the words you are using. Avoid industry jargon that only your employees would understand. Just as in the process of designing a keyword strategy, think of the words your customers use to describe your business and apply those phrases to your blogging language. After all, you want to create great blogs and include useful marketing offers with them. So how do you come up with a fantastic blog and marketing offers?

Key Components of a Great Blog Post

So what does a good business blog post look like? A well-constructed article includes several key components essential for attracting traffic and converting the traffic into leads:

  • A compelling article title: Your blog article’s title is the first thing people will see, so it should clearly indicate what the article is about. Clarity and specificity attract readers and prompt them to share the post with their networks. Your titles should also appeal to search engines: remember to include an industry keyword in your title for SEO purposes.
  • Well written & formatted text: The body of your article should be well-written and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read. Consider using header tags and bullet points to break up the content into sections. Ask a coworker or a friend to review the post before you publish.
  • Add multimedia content: Relevant multimedia content can make a blog article more memorable and fun to read. It also helps to break up the text to make it more pleasing to the eye. Aim to add at least one relevant image per blog post. Slideshow presentations, video and infographics are examples of other multimedia content you can feature.
  • Links: Include in-text links to relevant content, thus helping readers dig deeper into the resources they are most interested in. Your links can, naturally, point to your internal and landing pages to help you generate more leads from your content.
  • Call-to-action: Each and every blog article you publish should include a relevant call-to-action in the article to help boost lead generation.

Deciding What to Blog About

Most business blogs start with a purpose. What are you trying to educate your industry and potential customers about?

This education is not about your product. It’s about common industry issues, the problems your potential customers face and, sometimes, the solutions your product or service offer to tackle these challenges. A great way to start blogging is to answer the ten most common questions you get asked by prospective new customers. Do this once a week for ten weeks and you have the foundations of a successful blog.

Once those first ten weeks are over, check out your blogging analytics to see which articles resonated the most with your audience. If two or three of the posts received a significantly higher number of views and inbound links, try to expand on the topics at hand. Consider interviewing a coworker to reveal their thoughts on the subject.

Remember to let your expertise and passion shine through your blog content and keep some of these business blog best practices in the back of your mind.

Business Blogging Is About Lead Generation

Business blogging presents a fantastic platform for attracting organic traffic and engaging with your audience. However, the primary goal of your business blog should be to drive conversions. To achieve this goal, add call-to-actions to your posts and have them link to landing pages that provide downloadable access to more in-depth learning materials, such as an ebook or webinar.

Make sure to include CTAs both in the sidebar of your blog as well as on every individual article you publish. In addition to image/button CTAs, you can also include text CTAs within the body of your blog content. At the beginning, middle or end of every blog article, you need to place some sort of call-to-action that will encourage people to take action like:

Download some content || Follow the business on social media

Subscribe to the blog || Join our newsletter

When designing your CTAs, make sure it resonates with the content you have introduced in the blog post. For instance, if you are in the wellness and healthy food industry, you might write about how quinoa helps people create nutritional diets. The blog call-to-action in this instance would perform well if it linked to a report about 50 interesting nutritional facts.

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Other Content Used for Lead Generation

While it’s a great place to start, blog content isn’t the only type of content you can be creating to be successful with Internet marketing. You need to produce longer-form content items like ebooks, whitepapers, or research reports than can be used for lead generation. Also consider creating non-text based offers like how-to videos, webinars and slideshows.

Such offers will feed your business conversions. An industry resource that took some time and effort to put together provides the type of value visitors are looking for. It might educate, enrich one’s knowledge or simply entertain. In any case, it has the power to achieve an information exchange: the process in which a visitor fills out a lead capture form to access the resource. This is a critical point in the sales cycle.

The offers you produce shouldn’t be randomly selected. On the contrary, these is some precise math behind that decision: the math from your marketing analytics. Reporting insights will direct you to the types of content which attracts your target audience. For instance, if a whitepaper on heating systems brought you more leads and sales than a webinar on the same topic, then you should focus on writing more text-based content.

In this context, closed-loop marketing is an essential element of finding the highest converting offers and leveraging them appropriately.

What do you think of these guidelines and tips on creating a great blog and marketing offers?

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