Blogs are a great way to increase your online presence and making your site more visible on search engines. They can also be a great way to generate leads. Listed below are 7 steps to increase your visibility and attract quality leads to your website.
1. Make your blog an extension of your website: A visitor’s first experience with your company can be through your blog page so it is a good idea to ensure that the design and navigation mirrors your main site. You could also maintain the blog as a subdomain of your main domain rather than putting it into a separate domain entirely. This way you can ensure all inbound links to your blog will flow back to the primary domain.
2. Solve problems/share information: A blog should be a platform to share your resources or solve the problems of your customers. Too many businesses use their blog as a repository of press releases and other marketing-speak. The better option is to address customer queries and write about matters that concerns them. One good way is to use inquiries or frequently asked questions to understand what problems your customers are facing. Encourage conversation and engagement by responding to comments, even if they are negative ones.
3. Blog regularly: Though you don’t have to blog every day but it is a good idea to maintain a schedule that is sustainable for you. If you are a reluctant writer, you could hire a freelance copywriter or staff writer to help you keep it updated with regular content.
4. Keep the blog posts punchy and concise: A blog post should focus on a single idea. Think bullet points or short paragraphs and make sure to highlight important information. Open with a declarative sentence that sums up the key idea. You can also add a graphic, image or a video to the copy of your blog to make it more appealing or better explain your point.
5. Pen a killer title: Each new blog post creates a new page on your site, and every new page creates another opportunity to boost your ranking for one of your targeted keyword phrases in search engines. Your blog post title becomes your web page title, so titles do matter!
6. Offer subscription services: Allow your visitors to subscribe to get regular updates to your blog via RSS and e-mail. Essentially, every time you publish a post, the subscribers are notified to check it out. Plug-ins to allow subscription options are likely available for your blogging platform of choice.
7. Promote your blog through social media: The more traffic you attract, the more opportunities you have for conversions. So be sure to add with social-sharing icons, particularly Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This encourages your visitors to share your content and allows you to reach your network’s network, which is a key attribute of social media. Also, talk it up in e-mail newsletters, in print collateral and on other marketing materials.