If you are regularly writing a blog for your business – well done! It you’re not, then you are doing your business a disservice. Blogging is now a marketing essential; it should be a crucial part of your content marketing strategy.

A blog is a regularly updated website or web page that shares information, usually written in an informal or conversational style. For businesses, the purpose of a blog is provide your target audience with regular, entertaining and informative content on your product, service or industry.

Blogs are not limited to just straight articles. You can use infographics, case studies, product reviews and anything that your customers might value. 

One of the key benefits of a blog is that it helps you be found online. There are more than 1.8 billion websites[1]. It is not enough that you have a website, you need to actively manage your website to show up in search results. Your blog is an important part of your SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy.

There are two essential parts for successful blogging.

The first is self-explantory and obvious. You need to create blogs on useful topics for your audience. But the part of blogging that that is often overlooked is distribution. Ultimately you should spend more time on distribution and getting people to read your blog that on creation.

To develop useful blogs you need to understand your target audience, what their pain points are and what information they will value. If you’re struggling for ideas then think about your frequently asked questions. This should provide you with some good starting points for topics.

Also look at your website and social media metrics. See what types of posts and pages are the most popular. This will help steer you to create content that your audience is interested in.

We are not all born writers, so if writing isn’t your thing consider outsourcing this part of blogging.

When you have a finished blog it is crucial you have a plan for getting people to actually read it. Don’t think just because you shared it on social media once, sent it out to your email database and it’s live on your website that your job is done. It’s likely that only a small percentage of database and social media followers will read it with this approach.

You need to think about how you can repurpose that blog. Some simple ways to do this include pulling out the main points in your blog and creating visuals of them. Aim for four for each blog. Then share those with a link to the full blog on your social media accounts over a six week period. This means you can share the one blog four times and increase reach and engagement.

Or turn the key points into a video which you can upload on Youtube, embed in the blog post, share on social media and in your email. Videos get higher engagement across all platforms than text or images.

Blogging regularly helps build your brand, credibility and trust. It’s part of a strategic approach to winning customers. Results do take time. When done well you can create strong, long-lasting and more profitable relationships with your target audience.

[1] www.livestats.com