It’s no secret that business blogging amplifies lead generation efforts.
While many tech companies know their target audience reads blogs frequently (42.23% of the US population aged between 18 – 49), the competition for audience attention is fierce. So fierce, that over 4 million blog posts are published every day.
The question is, therefore — how to maintain a successful blog and get noticed in the midst of an endless cycle of information?
To answer the following, we’ve compiled a list of our 5 most useful tips on in-house blog management to help your business blog stand out from the crowd.
1. Know your audience
Start by asking yourself: What’s the purpose of my blog?
If your answer is to ‘promote my product or service’, try again.
Why?
Because demonstrating your value and building credibility by providing valuable content to your audience is ultimately more effective at creating relationships and eventually acquiring new business than a piece of a sales copy.
In fact, 34% of consumers are more likely to make a spontaneous purchase if a brand has tailored personalized content for its audience.
Creating a buyer persona is a great tool to get to know your target audience, and it helps you to create valuable content based on their background, goals, interests, and challenges.
SEO training site Backlinko is a great example of a business blog that knows its audience and provides them real value. Its highly informative and entertaining writing style makes learning about SEO’s intersection with digital marketing easy for content creators and DIY marketeers.
2. Update your content regularly
As we’ve previously mentioned, there’s a never-ending flood of new marketing content that’s updated quicker than Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Sometimes, it’s more effective to update old content than push out new material.
Why?
As well keeping your in-house content fresh and relevant, there’s a massive payoff SEO wise.
We’ve had first hand experience of this when we updated an old blog on the site. In just two weeks, the blog’s number of ranked keywords increased by over 60% (over 50 new keywords), and simultaneously boosted our blog’s online reach by 62%. Ultimately, this proved to do more for increasing our brand’s online exposure than the previous 10 new pieces of content we’d produced.
Here’s how we successfully gave our blog a facelift:
- Updated outdated content and added relevant insights
- Checked the grammar
- Removed broken links
- Optimised for new keywords
- Changed the date on wordpress
Creating a comprehensive owned media strategy and an editorial calendar will assist you in successful blog management and create a healthy balance between new and old material
3. Analyze your competitors’ content
To keep ahead of the game and ensure you’re not losing clicks to your rivals, you need to analyze and monitor your competition.
Analyzing your competitors content allows you to identify gaps in your own work, give you ideas how to take a fresh spin on something your rival has written about, gauge where relevant industry-specific conversations are, identify the gaps in your rivals’ content, and potentially exploit this by highlighting its importance in your own content.
So what’s the most effective way to keep and eye on the competition?
Apart from keeping a beady eye on their latest posts, there are some great tools which can give valuable insights into your competitors content:
–SEMrush: Tracks your rivals’ traffic and which keywords they’re ranking for.
–Google Keyword Planner: A free overall keyword tool that has a feature to monitor competitor keyword data, both paid and organic.
–SPYFU: Reveals which keywords your rivals are targeting.
-iSpionage: Analyzes your rivals’ most successful keywords and shows how much they spend on paid and organic search
4. Include Call To Actions
A relevant and well-placed call to action (CTA) is a useful tool for measuring your business blog’s ROI.
To create a captivating CTA — once again — you need to provide value for your readers.
How?
Offer them something they can’t resist. Start with a compelling command, promote enthusiasm, and leverage fear of missing out. Marketing influencer Neil Patel’s Get loved by Google! Get more traffic! CTA is a great example of a business blog that engages it’s audience with a captivating CTA that is relevant to its growth-hungry readers.
Additionally, make sure your CTA is in the right place and corresponds with your content — you can’t write about cybersecurity and have a CTA that calls the audience to increase their sales. A content marketing agency Brafton, for example, was able to increase their revenue from CTA’s by 83% just in one month by optimising the position and creating content surrounding its CTAs
5. Be Original
As well as educating your audience and targeting the right keywords, your blog content has to engage readers in order to be share-worthy and encourage repeat site visitors.
An article that trots out the same regurgitated material found on the top results of Google search queries might have been good enough a few years ago, yet ever-increasing competition, more sophisticated Google updates and shorter attention spans of readers means your content needs a bit of something special.
Sounds fair. But how can you be original in a world where millions of blog posts are published every day?
Here are some clever hacks for capturing your target audience’s attention:
- Create a compelling title
- Share real-world stories and provide clear-cut examples from your own experience
- Speak directly to your audience
- Present eye-catching facts and statistics
- Get to the point quickly
- Don’t be afraid to have an opinion
- Include thought provoking questions and quotes
- Use humour and analogies to breathe life into difficult or dull topics
Remember that even though you need to hook your audience in with blog posts, you don’t need to be Shakespeare to maintain a successful business blog. By choosing the right tone of voice, keeping the content informative and relevant, and showing your personality, you’ll be sure to stay on the right path.
Wrapping Up
When it comes to effective blog management, it all boils down to knowing your audience inside out.
Creating valuable and original content for your target audience and enhancing your lead generation process is what makes a blog successful and stand out from the downpour of stale second-rate content.
While doing so, it’ll also become a valuable asset to build and maintain consumer trust and amplify your PR efforts.
