Are you a small business owner with a blog? If so, chances are that you know how difficult it can be to stay on top of all the ever-changing blogging tips and tricks. With new ones being released constantly, it can be hard to keep up and even harder to remember which techniques work for your business and which do not.
That’s why we’ve created this list of 10 effective blogging tips for 2021! All of these tips have been tried, tested and seen to work well for our clients in the past few years; by following them, you’ll give your business an edge over others online.
Creating content for your company website is one of the smartest moves you can make as a small business owner. Blogging allows you to provide value to customers and can increase your website’s visibility in search engine results. To ensure you get the most out of blogging, here are our 10 most effective tips:
Table of Contents
Benefits of blogging for small businesses
Blogging for small businesses is an incredibly powerful tool when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). By posting articles of interest on a regular basis, your website will have better visibility on search engines and draw in more traffic. This can lead to higher page rankings and improved organic search results. Additionally, blogging for small businesses can help you establish yourself as an authority in the industry, attract potential customers, and build relationships with other brands.
With the right content management software, you can save money on advertising costs by doing all the work yourself – from writing blog posts to managing comments. If you don’t have enough time to write posts or manage comments effectively, it might be a wise idea to outsource part of the blogging process. While outsourcing may incur some upfront costs, the return on investment could be greater than if you were doing all the work yourself.
Writing high-quality blog posts that contain relevant facts and details gives your content semantic richness to help draw readers in and keep them engaged. With this type of content, readers get more value out of what they are reading and are more likely to share it with their networks.
What’s more, having this kind of content ensures that search engines like Google rank your website higher in its results pages so that people searching for topics related to your business will be able to find it easily – ultimately resulting in higher online exposure for your business.
Online marketing eliminates the need for companies to wait for months or even years before noticing any sign of success from a traditional advertising campaign. Instead, businesses can leverage digital marketing strategies such as SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and social media campaigns to reach their target audiences in a matter of hours.
Online marketing also provides an interactive platform for companies to engage with their customers more effectively – they can answer inquiries quickly and converse on topics that pique the interest of an audience in a much more timely manner than other mediums allow. Consequently, this allows them to create stronger relationships and build trust with their target audiences by providing real-time responses to questions and addressing customer concerns in a timely manner.
Blogging offers long-term value as it establishes brand credibility and builds up customer trust through engagement and dialogue.
There are many more benefits for small businesses to blog. They simply blog their way to growth when done properly.
Some of the benefits include having a place to engage with their customers, increasing brand awareness and credibility through social validation, establish themselves as an authority on a specific topic that resonates with the blog’s audience, and ultimately get better leads.
It is possible for small business owners to introduce new products or services in a way that feels more transparent and trustworthy. With time blogging can be used by professionals in any industry to ward off competitors from taking away prospective customers.
Professional companies often end up going much farther than just sign-up sheets at conferences or tradeshows due to bloggers being able to offer information about their products and services online without those qualified prospects ever having met them in person.
The benefit for a small business to blog is the ability to make their company and products or services known to potential customers online.
This can be done through blogging about subjects related to their product or service, posting frequently, or writing content that adds value to the lives of its readers.
A well-written blog post can easily go viral and help a business grow in reach and profit among new target audiences quickly.
Blogging is a powerful way to build authority and develop credibility, domain expertise, and backlinks for your business. It gives you the opportunity to engage with other bloggers in a niche field like yourself.
Blogging organically attracts people who have strong interests in what you are blogging about and builds relationships with them that might result in referrals or shares on social media.
You will establish thought leadership, set up content marketing platforms where customers or prospects can find you, have the chance to increase search engine rankings by linking newly created blog posts from your website back to original web pages anchored keywords, and finally blogging will help to generate potential leads by giving bloggers tips on best practices for generating traffic through guest blogging.
How to Start a Business Blog in 5 Straightforward Steps
1) Choose a Platform or Medium of Blogging
WordPress is an incredibly powerful and versatile platform for bloggers, especially for those looking to monetize their blogs or generate leads. With WordPress, you have access to an extensive library of plugins that allow you to easily add features like payment processing and advertising support.
Plus, with the ability to customize your blog’s design, themes, and codebase, you can create a website that looks professional and works exactly how you want it. WordPress also offers robust security protocols to protect your content from malicious attacks.
WordPress is open-source software that provides excellent SEO optimization support so that businesses can rank higher in search engine results. Overall, WordPress is ideal for business blogs because of its reliable architecture and vast range of features that make it easy to manage while providing an effective platform for monetizing your content.
2) Get Domain and Hosting
A domain is the address of your site while hosting is where all of the files live.
Together they make up what’s called a web host. You can get both from us at an affordable price with no contract or commitment required. We offer 24/7 customer service to help you out if anything goes wrong.
Our packages at Web Design Nigeria are designed to give you everything you need in order to start blogging right away without having to worry about any technical details.
The solution we offer comes with free corporate email accounts, SSL certificates, and more so that you can focus on what matters most – creating content for your readers!
We also have some great features like SiteLock® Security Suite which protects against malware and phishing scams as well as Domain Privacy Protection which keeps your personal information private by masking it from spammers who may be trying to steal it online.
With these features, there’s never been a better time than now to get started on building your blog empire!
3) Build your Blog or Website
Creating a website or blog of your own doesn’t have to be a daunting task. With our experienced team of developers and designers, we make the process simple and reasonably priced. We specialize in providing web design and development services tailored to the needs of bloggers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and more.
Our team will help you either create a website from scratch or improve an existing one with the latest responsive designs that look great on any device or screen size. Our services also include access to our free resources such as tutorials, templates, and more – so you won’t ever get stuck on your own.
We understand how important it is for owners of businesses to have their own website presence in order to promote their products and services effectively. We offer affordable solutions to suit your small business budget so you can feel confident in having a conversion-focused site that can be easily updated without needing to have any sort of technical or coding skills up your sleeves.
Effective Tips to Create a Small Business Blog that matters
Post consistently
Creating a successful small business blog requires consistency and commitment. It is essential to post regularly, ideally at least once every month, in order to engage with your audience and build trust. Without regular updates, readers will quickly become disinterested and unlikely to return. If you are just starting out with a blog, aim for a few posts a month and then gradually increase frequency as you become more comfortable with the process.
Quality over quantity
When it comes to content, quality should always trump quantity. Keep in mind that the goal of your blog should be to provide valuable insight into your industry or share helpful tips or advice related to your products or services. Spend time researching topics that are relevant to your target audience and use data-driven insights whenever possible. This will help keep readers coming back for more as they recognize that you offer unique perspectives on topics important to them.
Accurate and intriguing titles
In order to capture people’s attention, try using strong titles that accurately reflect the content of each article while also being intriguing enough to draw readers in. Additionally, be sure to include visuals such as images or videos whenever possible – visuals can significantly improve engagement by making content easier on the eyes and more interesting overall.
Promote your contents
Make sure you have an efficient structure for promoting your blog articles through different channels including social media platforms, email newsletters etc., so as to maximize reach and drive traffic back to your website. Consistent promotion is critical for getting maximum visibility for each post so take some time out of each week specifically dedicated to marketing efforts for the best results!
Create an editorial calendar
An editorial calendar is a powerful tool for blog writers and content creators. It allows you to plan ahead the topics and timing of your blog posts with precision, ensuring that each post is well-thought-out, relevant to your audience, and published on time. With an editorial calendar, you don’t have to wait until the last minute and can easily track what has been accomplished.
Editing calendars can as well help keep all blog posts organized and allows you to quickly reference old ideas when needed. If you are new to blogging or do not have any ideas of your own, there are plenty of free templates available online for many different types of blog posts. An editorial calendar is a great way to streamline the process of creating content, so consider investing in one today!
Conduct Keyword Research and Competitive intelligence
Keyword research tools are useful not only for SEO purposes but also to maximize the potential of content marketing.
Competitive intelligence used to be a difficult and time-consuming process that required hours of tedious keyword and market research. No longer. Today, the best keyword research tools make it easy to perform detailed competitive analyses even when you’re on the go.
Having an idea of what keywords you want to target is really important when it comes to blogging. The more relevant the keyword, the better chance your content will rank higher in search engines like Google or Bing and draw a larger readership.
The best way to start off with this process is by brainstorming different topics for blog posts that would be helpful and related to your niche or industry.
This will come in handy when you are coming up with ideas and titles for content.
You can also use Google Keyword Tool to research what keywords people are currently searching that may be relevant or could help improve your SEO ranking.
Google Keyword Tool – Free to use, displays search volume data and costs for keywords. The Google Analytics keyword tool is also a great resource because you can see what people are searching for already, as well as the projected amount of traffic that particular keyword will generate.
Tools like, The Hoth Google Keyword Planner, Ubbersuggest, Scrapebox, Majestic SEO, and Raven Tools, Long Tail Pro are good for finding all of the potential keywords in a domain’s backlink profile.
There are a number of different tools that work with hints and attempted linking patterns to help make your keyword research efforts more efficient.
There are two types– simple link crawlers and stats programs which also map out related pages. If you just want to know how a specific site is linked internally or externally, then there are simple and free tools for checking those domains individually.
Provide Value for your Blog Readers
For example; Small businesses selling shoes online can ensure their blog provides maximum value to readers by staying on top of the latest shoe trends and offering expert insights into the season’s best designs. They can showcase their products in surveys, tutorials, reviews, and other content designed to inform and engage readers. Connecting with industry professionals for collaborations also helps create content that offers valuable information and advice.
Include Relevant Information in Posts
Small businesses selling shoes online can benefit from writing blog posts with relevant and helpful content. For example, they might discuss the latest shoe trends and their top picks from the current season, as well as providing details on styles, materials, colours and sizes available. Additionally, facts such as popular brands, celebrity endorsements or best-selling products can be included to add more depth and entice readers to learn more about the products being offered.
Strive to achieve Optimized Blog Lengths
Your blog posts can range from 500 words to 3000+ words. The key is that the content should be optimized for a specific keyword – try and stay with around 1000-2000 words in length so you don’t confuse your readers or provide too much information at once.
The best way to measure if your blogging efforts are paying off is by reviewing the number of visitors to your site. If in a month you have 150-300 new visitors coming to your site, then it’s worth continuing and scaling up the frequency or length of each blog post (provided they’re high quality).
If your website or blog does not currently have a way to show you a benchmark and analytics report where you can see a daily, monthly, or annual report where you can see how your web or blog is faring on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) then you need to give us a call today. So we can support you with implementation.
Use a lot of visuals (videos, Images, Infographics)
Include a lot of relevant images on each page with descriptive headlines and be cautioned not to overdo it.
This will make your blog look more engaging and interesting – not to mention, give potential readers more things to click on and explore.
Statistics show that articles with at least one image will garner up to 250% the number of clicks than those without any pictures in them.
Choose from striking graphs, infographics, pictograms (or icons), typograms (or symbols), or stylish illustrations for adding visual zest to your posts.
Many writers find it difficult to come up with ideas for new topics when they are struggling to blog consistently- so I want If you want to include a lot of visuals – use some of the following techniques:
Use numbers in your content not only as a means to break up a paragraph but also as an intuitive way to convey meaning and introduce numeric data: 84% of adults aged 18+.
Create charts and graphs for numerical information. It makes it easier to digest specific amounts. A pie chart with labels is much more easily understood than a number in isolation.
When using video or other forms of media, upload quality images that illustrate points from the video – for example, screenshots of visual stories used in conferences; the person standing on stage giving a talk about her business; or quotes from written speeches. With so much content on the internet, it is important to make content that stands out.
For video or other forms of media, use captions and subtitles in videos because not everyone speaks English fluently – and they are also good for search engine optimization (SEO).
Need a Professional Website?
Web Design Nigeria is a New age web design agency in Lagos, Nigeria, that specializes in creating business-ready websites for entrepreneurs and small business owners. We offer a wide range of services, from custom website design to search engine optimization and social media marketing.
Our team has been designing websites for years and we are always up on the latest trends in web design so your site will be on top of its game! Contact us today on 08114900422 or 07020907689 to get started with your new website or blog.