Business blog: how to open up opportunities?

As we recently discussed on this blog, the content marketing is now indispensable in a digital marketing strategy.

The blog is a rich tool and an essential element that will allow you to:

The benefits of a blog for your business

There are therefore many reasons to start your company blog; here are a few that should convince you to take up blogging.

A boost for your brand image

The blog is an essential communication tool for to develop your reputation and visibility on the Web, while shaping your brand image. It gives you all the space needed to communicate with your customers about your company, your products, your market.

Your blog is also a way to convey an image of expertise in your field. Indeed, by by publishing blog posts, you can provide relevant information and useful content (product tests, tutorials, news…) to your visitors. This will strengthen your credibility in your sector.

Finally, the blog allows you tohumanize your company's image, answering your customers' issues. But also by communicating about internal company news, for example a change of premises or the company's participation in a trade show with a few photos of your booth.

Your blog also allows you to manage your online reputation, allowing you greater visibility but also enabling you to respond.

If you are facing an online smear campaign, several customers are unhappy with your services, your blog gives you space to respond intelligently and constructively to those criticisms. It is a tool for exchange, so the blog has its place in this type of situation.

The blog: effective for interactions

The blog is a less formal communication tool that particularly encourages interaction between the company and its customers and prospects.

That makes it the ideal place to share information; the company allows its visitors to access high-value information to which users can react spontaneously.

Sharing non-commercial information on a company's blog creates a more "relaxed" atmosphere and encourages discussion around an article through the comments.

It's an opportunity for visitors to share their experience, thereby enriching the information present in the article.

The content creation quality on your blog serves as a basis for:

Share your own content and make your visitors want to share it in turn. It's therefore important to ensure that the share buttons to the various social networks are present and work correctly on your blog.

Improves organic search ranking

The blog is also a significant tool in terms oforganic search optimization, blogging is even one of the easiest ways to improve your company's website SEO.

It allows you, indeed, to create and publish unique content very regularly, tied to your website's URL.

Your blog also allows you to improve your link building, both through internal linking and external links. The ongoing creation of blog posts is a goldmine for creating more links between your web pages, a practice highly valued by search engines.

Publishing quality articles, combined with a bit of networking, can also allow you to obtain external linkslinks from influential sites or blogs pointing to your blog, reinforcing its legitimacy in Google's eyes.

Publishing quality content optimized for organic search is a very effective way to boost traffic to a web page.

A few tips to get started

The vast majority of your potential customers will do online research before any purchase. Business blogging is a low-cost marketing strategy that lets you open an easy dialogue with your target audience and provide useful information, while subtly positioning your brand as a suitable solution to the problem.

If you plan to create your company blog, before diving headfirst into writing articles, take the time to precisely define your needs and expectations.

Your blog should serve your business and help you generate leads.

In order to offer a relevant and coherent blog, it is important toestablish a clear editorial line of your blog and to adhere to it.

This editorial line should align with your industry and market, and always be attentive to your customers' needs and expectations.

And yes, above all the blog is primarily aimed at your customers and prospects.

To best direct your editorial line, it is important to answer these 8 questions:

1. What are my goals?

First, ask yourself why you are creating a blog for your business. Knowing where you're going helps you chart the best path!

Very often, a blog's objectives are:

In short, your blog's objectives may be numerous, so once you've listed them, rank them from most to least important.

Furthermore, knowing your content objectives will make it easier to find topics and define the calls-to-action to include.

2. What is my audience profile?

If you haven't already, you should study the profile of your prospects. Who are they? What do they want? How do they communicate? What are their obstacles and motivations?

All these answers contribute to developing an editorial line that matches your leads' needs. That way, you can be confident your content will attract qualified visitors who will want to contact you.

The profile of your buyer personas also helps you determine the tone and language to use with your readers.

Buyer personas are a representation of your ideal customer guided by your own data and market research.[/su_list]

To help you find them, survey your team and identify the characteristics your best customers have in common. You can then interview them to find out how they discovered your business and why they like and recommend your products or services.

3. Which promotion channels will I use?

Normally, this question is partly resolved by the previous one. Knowing your prospects perfectly involves identifying the communication channels they prefer:

This information helps you select the content formats offered on the blog.

4. Which metrics should I analyze?

For your blog to meet your goals, it's important to determine the key metrics of your success! Number of visitors, bounce rate, article shares on social networks, incoming queries, percentage of returning visitors… are all KPIs to analyze regularly to verify that your editorial line is consistent with your objectives.

However, there's no need to evaluate every metric you find in Google Analytics! You should choose those that relate to your goals.

5. How often should I publish?

Also based on your goals, you must define the ideal publishing frequency. Obviously, the more you publish, the more material you offer your prospects. Your traffic will grow accordingly, as will lead acquisition.

Frequency will therefore depend on your current activity and growth objectives. A freelancer won't need to publish at the same pace as an SME able to support a sharp increase in activity!

More than frequency, consistency is what matters! It's better to write one article per week than to publish 2 articles in 2 days and then nothing for 3 weeks…

6. How often can I publish?

In addition to evaluating the perfect pace to reach your goals, you should analyze your available time. After all, you may be able to absorb a large increase in activity without being able to write articles frequently. A lack of skill can also be a barrier to posting on the blog. Web writing is a profession!

So, if you notice a gap between your production capacity and the needs to reach your goals, you'll need to consider delegating part of this task to a professional writer.

7. What will the structure of your blog be?

It is also essential to determine, from the start, the overall structure of your future blog.

Blogs allow sharing a wide variety of content, from pillar articles of more than 1,500 words to short news briefs, including infographics, how-to's and ultra-comprehensive guides.

To quickly launch a company blog, you can use a CMS (Content Management System, content management system in French).

Today, WordPress is the most popular CMS in the blogging world, with 74.6 million sites using WordPress worldwide in 2014WordPress is downloadable for free.

Create a WordPress site will give you a site that is easy to use for writing and layout. It also allows quick customization with a good quality/price ratio. In addition, WordPress can be optimized for SEO naturally thanks to the addition of SEO plugins.

8. How should the work be divided within the team?

To get your blog up and running, you'll then need to gather some necessary tools and take stock of the team you have available.

Will you hire? Are you alone in running your blog? Will you divide the blog's different tasks internally across your existing teams? Will you work with freelance writers?

You will need to decide who will write, edit, publish and promote your blog. But also who will be responsible for analytics and data, who will handle layout, and more… You will also need to choose your tools (a management system (CMS), a spell checker…).

Thanks to these 8 questions, you will be able to develop an editorial strategy that will appeal to your prospects and meet your objectives! Ready to take action?

Need help getting started?

For simplicity, you can find WordPress freelancers for free on Codeur.com that will help you install your blog on WordPress and optimize it.

To start writing your blog posts easily and efficiently, don't hesitate to call on professional writers from Redacteur.com who will allow you to publish your first articles in less than 24 hours.

Today, corporate blogging is an integral part of effective web communication, and offers many advantages at different levels: customers, SEO, visibility and brand image.

We hope this article will be useful to you. If you have other questions or experiences to share, leave a short comment at the bottom of this article.

Feel free to share this article on social media. If the article helped you, it might help your followers 😉