One of the most commonly used and successful marketing tactics businesses use is blogging. Having a blog on your website can help improve SEO, bring in more people, prove you’re an expert in your chosen field, and much more.
In addition, as much as 77% of bloggers report that blogging drives results, so it’s not surprising that nearly every business has a blog.
If you want to read more advanced tips on growing your business, make sure to visit a growth marketing blog where you can see some useful tips for business growth and marketing. But now, let’s get straight into how you can create a successful blog.
Create unique content
Unique content is online content that is completely unique in the sense that it isn’t a duplicate of any other content you can find online. Creating unique content is important because it helps with SEO (search engine optimization).
SEO is an important thing to focus on because organic search drives 53.3% of all website traffic. Optimizing content for search engines is complicated and requires a lot of effort. Unique content is an important part of driving organic traffic and if you want more SEO tips, you can check out a beginner’s guide to doing SEO.
But getting a high-ranking position on Google is far from being the only reason why you should create unique content. When you write unique blog posts, you are providing your readers with more value and showing you know what you’re talking about.
Here are a few tips for creating unique content:
- When doing research for a blog post, use as many sources as possible.
- Always write in the same style that will be unique to your brand or blog.
- When writing, try to do it from your own memory as much as possible.
- Try not to look only at content that already exists online when you’re writing your blog posts.
And finally, you need to use a plagiarism checker to make sure your content is truly unique. Slipups can happen and before you click “Publish”, it would be best to check if you didn’t create duplicate content by mistake.
Plan out what you’re going to write
One of the biggest reasons why a lot of small business blogs fail is because the people who are writing them don’t have enough ideas. If you think you’re going to have bursts of amazing ideas, you’re probably wrong. It would be great if you did of course, but most blogs require planning.
The best advice for someone who is running a business blog is to write about things customers are going to be interested in.
For example, let’s say you own a business that sells tech devices. You can write blogs about what to look out for when you’re buying new technology, comparisons between the old and new model of a cellphone brand, or simply respond to the most often questions you receive from customers.
A great way you can find out what your customers would be interested in reading is to search for keywords and phrases people use when they research your services. These phrases will give you an insight into what your customers want to see and generate great ideas for blogs.
And make sure to include the keywords you found in your blog posts. Keywords are another important part of successful SEO and it would be ideal to use long-tail keyword phrases. These phrases are 3-4 words long and usually more obscure, which means they are usually easier to rank for.
Mind the word count
A big question a lot of people who are beginner bloggers ask is how long the articles they publish should be. This is actually a commonly debated topic and some people believe that a blog post should be around 300-400 words long since most people just scan the content they read online.
But if you want the articles you post to have a high-ranking position on Google and provide your readers with quality information, it’s better to write articles that are at least 1,000 words long. After all, you can’t provide in-debt information in just 300 or 400 words.
However, not every topic will require that many words. Your articles should be as long as necessary, and if you can convey your message in just 300 words, there’s no need to go over that word count. But more often than not, you will have to write longer blog posts.
Another thing you need to remember is that no matter how many words you write, you should make sure that your blog reads well and holds the attention of the reader.
You can achieve that in a few ways:
- Only write about the topics that meet your target audience’s needs.
- Break up your content into smaller chunks that are easy to scan.
- Write your sentences and paragraphs in various lengths.
- Break up the monotony by including visual content such as pictures, videos, and infographics.
- Use the active voice when writing as much as possible.
Final thoughts
Blogs have been an important part of business websites for almost as long as the internet has existed. If you want to draw attention to your company, you can do so with well-written blog posts that will catch your target audience’s attention. But before you start writing, remember these tips.
