Everything you need to know for starting your own blog.
Your blogs are one of the only 2 things you own online (along with your list of customers on your email list, we don’t actually own our social media followers!). Your blog is where you build your brand.
Creating a blog gives you a hub to add value to your target market, build a brand, and build an audience. This is attraction marketing in motion… giving people what they want, providing value, creating content, building trust & relationships, and PROFIT.
If you’ve been trying to get your brand out there, publishing content on your website but you’re still not getting the kind of attention, respect, and income you desire… then you have come to the right place.
How a blog can help drive traffic and sales for you to your website
Blogging is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and promote your products or services.
By providing fresh, relevant content on a regular basis, you can attract new visitors to your site and keep them coming back for more. In addition, blogging can also help to boost your search engine rankings and increase the visibility of your website.
And best of all, it’s a relatively inexpensive marketing tool that any small business can use to reach a wide audience. So if you’re not already blogging, now is the time to start. Your business will thank you for it.
1. Drive traffic to your website
Every business wants more website traffic. There’s no point having a website if nobody is looking at it. So how do you get those clicks and those eyes on your site?
The main three ways you can get organic (not paid, there are paid strategies also) traffic to your website are:
- Search engines
- Social media
- Blogging
And those three things are all interconnected. Here’s how…
Every time you write a blog post, you’re creating more fresh content for your website.
Content is picked up by search engines (we’ll discuss how this is optimised next). Social media posts all need content. Blog posts provide that content.
Any small business owner knows that a strong web presence is key to success in the modern world. Blogging provides fresh content for social media platforms, helping to keep customers engaged and coming back for more.
It also helps to attract new customers, as blogging can improve website traffic and search engine rankings. In fact, you could say that blogging is the backbone of your web presence. without regular blogging, it would be difficult to maintain a strong online presence.
2. Blogs Post Are Great for SEO
Creating regular blog content is one of the best things you can do to improve your website’s SEO.
By producing quality blog posts and including helpful SEO indexing terms, you are making it easier for search engines to find and index your site. This, in turn, increases the chances that users will find your site when they enter relevant search terms.
Therefore, blogging is an essential component of a successful SEO strategy. Not only does it help to improve your site’s ranking in search results, but it also provides valuable content for users.
So if you’re looking to boost your SEO, be sure to start blogging today.
Our experts at Abundant Life Studio can provide you with a keyword report for your niche if you would like to create blogging yourself.
3. Describe your business in detail for your audience to see
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a process of making your website more visible to search engines like Google and Bing.
Part of SEO is writing RELEVANT, keyword-rich content on your website. You want to use the same words that people are actually searching for when they go looking for businesses like yours.
One of the great things about blogging is that you can control the keywords on your website by choosing what topics to write about. Writing RELEVANT, keyword-rich blog posts helps your website show up higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which means more people will see your website and hopefully visit it.
And as an added bonus, SEO also helps you build credibility with potential customers. When someone searches for a business like yours and finds your website at the top of the SERPs, they’re more likely to trust that you’re a credible authority in your industry.
4. Become the authority in your niche
So, we’ve established that content is good. And what is even better than content? Excellent, keyword RICH content.
Recent statistics have also shown that blogs are the 5th most trusted source for content online. So it goes to show that writing authoritative, well-written articles about your industry will leave the reader thinking one thing: that you’re an expert. And people trust experts.
If your blog posts aren’t just interesting but genuinely useful, they’ll become go-to web content for your industry. And all of that equals web traffic to your site and positive brand enhancement for your business.
So, if you’re looking to improve your blog’s quality, don’t skimp on the content – make sure it’s informative, engaging and reflective of your brand’s voice.
Chat with our expert team today at Abundant Life Studio if you need your content to rock!
5. Develop a voice for your brand
So, we’ve got good, high-quality content with authority that the search engines love. What else do we need?
If we want people to actually read it, we need it to be engaging.
Developing your voice is a very important part of brand identity. Writing in an engaging, casual, yet authoritative style is easier said than done though and does require practice.
But once you have found a unique voice that you are comfortable with, readers will come to find it familiar and will create positive associations with your brand.
Using techniques like asking questions in your blog posts, even making some jokes, can all help your customers feel at ease with your style. You want your blog to be the one they look forward to reading.
6. Customer insight
As any writer will tell you, ENGAGEMENT is key. And that’s just as true when it comes to business blogging.
By engaging with your readers, you not only keep their attention, but you also create a conversation. Not to mention, you can glean some valuable information from them.
For starters, try offering a subscription form on your blog. That way, you can collect names and email addresses right away. Most blog platforms offer analytics too, so you can track the clicks, referrals, and engagement with your blog.
7. Keep the conversation going
Right, so we’re getting to know who our readers are, which is awesome. We can also have conversations with them via our blog.
Adding comment fields means that your readers can share their thoughts on your blog posts or ask further questions about the content. This helps to keep the conversation going with your audience.
8. Opportunities for sharing
When you read something inspiring, informative, or just fun, the first thing to do is share it with people. All of us have done that at some point! It’s a given.
Blogs are great for sharing. Their format is really user-friendly and you can incorporate social media buttons on your posts to make it even easier.
This gives your audience the opportunity to spread the word for you without you lifting a finger.
9. Link to other relevant content
One of the joys of blogging is having complete control over the content. You can blog about whatever you like, and link to whatever you want. This gives you the power to direct traffic on your site to where you want it to go.
The most sensible thing to link regularly to is other relevant content on your own site, such as connected blog posts, product pages, or contact forms.
By linking regularly to your own content, you can help keep visitors engaged with your site and encourage them to explore more of what you have to offer. So why not take advantage of this power and start linking up your blog today?
10. Blogging is fun and free
There are many aspects to running a business and there’s nothing preventing them from being fun.
Take blogging for example.
Once you start developing your own voice, you’ll soon start to look forward to writing your blog posts. Thinking of ways to engage your customers and be creative with your writing is fun.
And it’s free! So why not give it a try? You might just surprise yourself with how much you enjoy it. Or if you don’t enjoy it, chat with our expert team at Abundant Life Studio who can manage this for you.
The 3 most common mistakes people make when starting a blog
Starting a blog is a crucial part of any business, especially when you are practising Attraction Marketing. It gives you a hub, or a home base to add value to your target market, build a brand, and build an audience.
While there are a ton of tutorials on how to physically get a blog up and running, the topics covered here are largely overlooked as a whole, which causes all sorts of issues in the long run.
You see, because it has gotten so easy to set up a blog and start writing, MOST people don’t put any thought into WHY they are blogging, or WHO they are blogging for! THIS is where this information will be priceless for you. This is what to know before starting a blog.
Before we even get in to the technical aspects of starting a blog, you MUST understand the following concepts:
– What is Attraction Marketing?
– What is your ‘why’?
– Who is your Target Market?
– What Problem do you solve?
– How will you solve that problem?
– What is your Unique Selling Proposition?
– How will you brand yourself?
– What content will you
These are the 3 most common mistakes people make when starting a blog:
- Not defining your target market
- Not figuring out your site structure
- Not doing basic keyword research
Defining your target market
If I were to break down this process into its simplest form, it would be this – figure out who you want to serve, and then figure out how you can serve them. Once you do this, everything else falls in line. Before you begin any type of content creation, marketing, or monetisation strategy, you have to know who you are talking to.
If you come from a place of service to your community and target market, then every piece of content you create will naturally be created out of a need to help that community. Your content will be created in order to solve your target market’s biggest challenges, concerns and problems.
A lot of people getting started don’t define their target market at all, and when you visit the blog of this type of person, you will notice instantly. Blog posts are all over the place, covering a range of topics that don’t relate to one another and clearly were not created based on a need to help a specific group of people.
Let’s say you decide that your target market is people who love camping, and you want to be able to help them get the best gear for cheap, find the best campsites, travel the country and experience the lifestyle of a ‘digital nomad,’ and you are able to monetize this business through affiliate marketing.
Now let’s imagine that you get a member of this target market to visit your blog, and the very first article they see is about why your local steakhouse serves the best ribeye… do you think that reader is going to stick around when they come to your site for camping tips? Probably not.
The first step in figuring this out is to answer the following questions –
- Who are you?
- What do you stand for?
- Who do you serve?
- How can you serve them?
The first two questions up there are extremely important. You need to figure out what you are passionate about. What’s life all about for you? What do you like to talk about? What are your values? What’s important to you? If you don’t base your blog around something you are passionate about, you will lose interest quickly.
Once you pinpoint who your target market is, then it’s time to figure out what their biggest challenges, concerns, and problems are. What do they REALLY want?
There are some great resources that you can tap in to to start diving in to your target market’s biggest questions and concerts. You want to do some research here and make sure that you KNOW this information, and you are not just assuming you know it.
Here are some great options:
- Social Media – look at hashtags that may be associated with your market. What are they talking about? What words are they using? What questions are they using? Are there any Facebook groups based around your target market that you can join?
- Reddit – Reddit is an online community that provides ‘subreddits’ or small communities of specific interests. There is a subreddit for pretty much every topic. Find your relevant community there and join the discussion.
- Question & Answer sites – Question and answer sites like Quora, or Yahoo Answers can give you great insight into the actual questions your target market is asking when searching in Google (or any search engine) – Find out from their mouths (or fingers..) what their most pressing questions are.
- AnswerThePublic.com – This is an awesome resource that provides you with questions that your target market is asking in Google and Bing. This is such a great service that, while it’s free now, it probably won’t be soon. It even allows you to export the information they give you in a very nice visual data sheet.
These are just some examples, but the bottom line is – find out where your target market hangs out online, and join the conversation.
If all of this is far too much work for you to handle, then contact our expert copywriters at Abundant Life Studio who are ready to rock out your next killer content piece.
Submit your enquiry HERE and a member of our team will be in touch! Alternatively contact us at –
hello@abundantlifestudio.com.au
+61 0400 580 887