9 tips on how to boost readership for a small business blog
Are you struggling to attract a significant amount of traffic to your blog? If the answer to this question is yes, there are a number of tactics smaller businesses can use to gain a loyal readership and achieve the goals you desire for your business blog.
Increased traffic provides the visibility you need to engage with a wider audience and sell the services or products you offer. Without traffic, your efforts for creating useful content are all made in vain.
If your blog is struggling to attract the attention it deserves, read on. My helpful tips provide a set of beneficial strategies used by the top marketers across the globe.
Tip 1. Regular content
For starters, create an effective content calendar with a range of compelling topics to be published frequently and to a specific schedule. To boost your blog’s traffic you need to connect…
A Wordpress plugin that shows how everyone can manage their content calendar
In a previous post I wrote about an editorial calendar spreadsheet which we have created to help marketers manage their content marketing. While the spreadsheet allows you to plan and manage different types of content within a team, operational tools are useful too.
In this post I wanted to share a tool we use with it for managing posting on the Smart Insights website - The Wordpress Editorial Calendar plug-in. It will be particularly interesting for Wordpress bloggers who don't know about it, but may also interest others since it shows how you can make your editorial process more streamlined. I first heard about this plugin through Chris Brogan who describes how he uses it.
About the Editorial calendar plugin
The plugin works with the basic blog functionality you have come to know and love in WordPress.…
10 tips for improving visibility for a new blog
If you already have a blog and have made it the hub of your content sharing online, then what's next? I would like to share my top 10 tips that you can apply at any time to improve your blog’s visibility even if you have relatively limited resources for blogging.
The tips are mainly intended for those new to blogging, but I hope seasoned bloggers may get some ideas or reminders from it. We are all looking for ways to improve visits to our blogs without doing extra writing!
Top 10 tips for improving your blog visibility
1. Optimize your blog for SEO
Improve your keyword research. It will help to determine what keywords need to be included in your posts. Tools such as Wordtracker, SEMRush, and Google AdWords Keyword Tool will help you choose keywords…
A 5 step process for creating or refreshing a business blog
Whether launching a new WordPress blog or, as in my case, relaunching an existing blog, there are many issues to consider and a number of ways to approach the project.
Having recently redeveloped and redesigned a WordPress blog, to help other marketers, I thought I would share some of the considerations that we took into account. I've split the project up into two parts; this first post focuses on the objectives, planning and resource considerations. The more "hands-on" functionality and implementation considerations will follow in Part 2.
To add a bit of context, 3 years ago, a brand I now work on, set up a skiing blog called Ski-buzz, run on WordPress. Set up on a free theme and with minimal amounts of additional resource or budget it started life quite slowly. Unbranded, sitting on its own (totally separate domain) and growing slowly…
How to create an inbound marketing strategy - some case studies of tools and tactics
I've found setting up and running a small business is both daunting and exciting in equal measure.
The combined economic downturn and increasingly crowded competitive landscape mean the need to promote your business and get your message ‘out there’ is as important as ever.
The small business marketing challenge
Marketing is a huge challenge for small businesses, particularly start-ups with no established customer base or community around them.
Traditional advertising is an absolute necessity to let people know who you are.
But if you’ve limited money and resources, what other options do you have to get your message about your fantastic new business out there?
Inbound marketing is one strategy I would highly recommend.
An introduction to inbound marketing - ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’
For any business, large or small, there are three key media types you can use to connect with consumers;…
21 reasons to persuade yourself or your colleagues you need to blog, blog more or blog better
Are you needing a bit of ammunition to justify the time and energy to invest in a blog? Or perhaps you have a blog and you're looking to increase the frequency or quality of your posts. At Musicademy, blogging is core to what we do to engage existing customers and attract new customers, so this is how we justify our efforts and it certainly is a lot of effort!
So, here are 21 good reasons to get blogging or blog better. And rule number one of good blog writing – blog readers love lists! (As long as they're useful or inspire)
Because blogging drives traffic to your website. The blog can feed a stream of tweets, Facebook updates and newsletter content as well as leaving…
Integrating blogging with other communication tools – an integrated approach
Although blogging is far from new, I find that relatively few organisations have really started using blogs effectively. Where they have, they have found a tool that delivers on multiple fronts because it's integrated into all their communications.
When used effectively, the blog is a place for you to develop newsletter content, integrate with other social media tools, showcase your expertise, play with ideas, research a topic and discover customer views. Of course, blogs also yield dividends in terms of SEO as other sites pick up your content giving you invaluable back links, and customers will get on with the job of tweeting and liking your work.
The Blog Central model
Below is a model I’ve developed to use when explaining the concept to colleagues and on my training courses. To make the point of how blogging must be at the heart of your communications,…
How to promote your company blog to reach a larger audience
Writing a blog doesn't end when you hit the publish button. Far from it. In this third part of our series on business blogging, René Power reviews the best approaches to seeding and distributing your blog content - giving it the best chance of being seen by the people you're targeting.
1. Promote it on your website
Add a snippet to your home page. It provides a sign post for visitors and also offers some additional search engine optimisation benefits if you have considered your keywords carefully.
2. Index your blog with major blog directories
Ensure your blog is listed in as many blog directories as possible, particularly those with specialist sections. Why? Backlinks to your blog are still one of the most important factors in determining how visible your blog (and…
8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
Six post ideas which work for any business blog
Following on from the recent Smart Insights post on 30 ideas to get more visitors to your blog, I thought I'd follow-up with some more specific ideas for B2B blogs. I believe blogs are the foundation of any respectable BB content marketing strategy and the place where issues can be explored, trends discussed, communities created and prospects identified. So in the first in a series of posts on business blogging, I'll discuss how to avoid a common challenge - what to write about!
A company blog can, over time, significantly increase a website’s presence in search engine results and be a valuable source of inbound inquiries for a business. It is crucial that to be successful, your business has to tap into the needs of your target audience, and provides useful, usable and relevant content.
For me, the trick to effective business blog…
