BLOGGING.
In 2020, most business owners have a blog connected to their brand. While the exact number is always growing, most estimates have the number of blogs at 600 million. That figure is expected to rise over the next few years, so mastering your blog now is essential to your company's success.
An excellent blog has a ton of potential for you and your marketing team. Blogs allow you to learn more about your target audience, engage with your customers, grow your email list and much more.
Bloggers and business owners often struggle with nailing down a successful formula. Truth be told, there's no one-size-fits-all glove for content marketing. However, there are several things you can do to improve upon your existing strategy and maximize your conversions.
Let's take a look at several essential tips you need to keep in mind if you want to break through the noise and give your blog a chance to shine.
1. Master writing headlinesHeadlines are, without a doubt, a pivotal point of success for your business. When a consumer lands on your blog, the headlines will help them decide whether they should click through and read the content.
If your headlines are dull and lackluster, consumers will bounce from your page and look for another website. We know the importance of subject lines as it pertains to emails. In fact, 47% of emails are opened or discarded based solely on the subject line. You can apply a similar rule to your blog posts.
In other words, the headline will determine whether a consumer clicks through or leaves your website. There are several ways you can improve the quality of your headlines.
First, we suggest you create plenty of variations of the same headline. Big-name websites like Buffer create 25-30 changes for their headlines before they decide on their pick? Why? The main reason seems to be that our brain tends to get more creative as we, well, create. So coming up with a handful of headlines is helpful, but if you can manage to come up with at least 20, you'll have some great options to choose from.
We also suggest you test your headlines over time. For instance, if you're publishing content about email marketing, you would want to experiment with different headline variations that relay similar information. If you see more traffic on one post over another, you know that the headline change was partially responsible for the boost in traffic.
2. Write content designed for your customersYou should also make sure the text within your blog post is designed for your target audience. There are plenty of examples of companies posting articles with a headline that resonates with users but doesn't deliver once they start reading the post. For context, imagine clicking this article about blogging tips, only to find that we never mentioned blogging once.
The main reason for this inconsistency is brand owners, and marketers don't understand their target audience. If you want to write blog posts that consumers will find relatable, you have to learn more about the people you want to read your content.
Buyer personas are profiles that you can make for your target audience. Essentially, each persona represents the personality type of a person that will get the most value from your product or service. You'll want to learn about demographics, buying patterns, consumer behavior, pain points and goals before creating a comprehensive persona.
Once you have all of this information in hand, you'll be able to create content that matches what your audience wants to see. Let's revisit the email marketing firm example from earlier. If you discover that 70% of your audience across all buyer personas are struggling with generating new leads, you would want to create a blog post with an informative headline and similarly helpful content within the post.
When you don't know the people you hope to reach, you're going to have a hard time creating explosive content. Take some time to gather feedback, review analytics and talk to social media users. All of this information will help you create personas that will determine your content schedule in the future.
3. Implement SEO across the boardSearch engine optimization (SEO) is something that many marketers and business leaders have relied on since online marketing became the norm. A lot had changed about SEO over the years, and the continually evolving nature means it's hard to get concrete advice, but we will do our best.
All facets of SEO is vital for business growth. The introduction of voice search, which is used by smart home devices and phone assistants, has opened even more doors for blogging teams. A surprising 62% of people with smart speakers have made a purchase with their device. Voice search is slightly different from traditional text SEO but is equally important.
Instead of a search phrase like "email marketing," more marketers target long-tail keywords in their content such as, "How to generate leads with email marketing" in an attempt to rank when consumers use voice search to look for the answer to a question.
When you consider that 5.14 billion searches happen on Google every day, it's clear that context is the name of the game. Google's crawlers browse websites, rank them on the words they use, and the relevancy of the rest of the content. If you want to make it to the top of page 1, you have to make sure you're optimizing for text and voice SEO.
4. Use a clear CTAFinally, let's talk about your call to action (CTA) in your blog posts. Most articles have a CTA, such as signing up for a lead magnet, joining an email list, or buying a product or service. Every business is different, so your request will vary depending on your marketing needs.
There are several universal tips you should keep in mind when experimenting with different calls to action. It's worth noting that split testing your placement, button color and verbiage can significantly impact the performance of your post. One study found that by changing their CTA to red from green, the conversion rate increased by 21%. In other words, experimenting with this part of your blog is a great way to tweak the outcome of your post.
The most important thing you need to remember here is your CTA must align with the outcome of the subscription or sale. So if a person subscribers through your blog to receive a lead magnet, you should immediately send them what they requested. Failure to follow through could damage your reputation and make it harder to secure future sales and build trust with customers.
Now you have the tools you need to start creating your own explosive blog. Every company is a little different, so feel free to use whatever advice we offered that makes sense during your journey. The most important tip we have for you is to remember to stay consistent.
You can become a powerhouse in your industry if you're consistently publishing well-written, informative content. Take the time to research your target audience, work on your headlines, fine-tune your SEO and work on your CTA to see more traffic, sales and conversions on your company blog.
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