Blogging for business purposes involves using blog content to market our businesses in a similar way to how we would use social media, email or other forms of content marketing. However, unlike many other forms of content marketing, blogging uses long-form content (often 1,000+ words per blog post) to explore a subject area in greater depth. In this guide, you will discover how to use blogging for business.
Summary: How to Use Blogging for Business
When we write blog content for our business websites, we are aiming to do three things:
Increase our website's visibility in the search engines, so we can captivate our target audience and drive them to our website.
Connect with our target audience by providing value, so we can build the know, love and trust factor that is crucial to making sales.
Convert our website visitors into clients or customers, by linking our blog content to our offers.
Blogging is a valuable tool for driving organic, sustainable growth for independent and small businesses. A consistent blogging strategy focused on creating quality content can lead to long-term, long-lasting growth in visibility, website traffic and sales. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to cost a penny if you commit to investing the time and effort into learning how to blog effectively and implementing a consistent strategy.
By blogging purposefully and consistently, and incorporating SEO best practices, you can captivate, connect with and convert your target audience through blog content. Ultimately, blogging can transform your website into a revenue-generating asset for your business.
Skip to a Section:
Connect: How to nurture your target audience with blogging
Convert: How to drive sales through blogging
What is a Business Blog?
It is often thought that blogging is used only by influencers or bloggers to promote products through sponsored content and affiliate links. However, this is not the case. Businesses and brands, from small independents to established companies, can use blogging to increase their online visibility, nurture their audience and drive sales. Many of the principles of business blogging are similar to influencer blogging, but there are some differences in how and why blog content is created and used.
A business blog is a collection of posts or articles that cover a range of topics relevant to the business's products or services. Often, a business blog will cover educational topics that aim to teach the audience how to do something. However, a business blog can cover a whole range of themes, including:
Gift guides
Pros and cons
Answering common questions
Reasons why
Ideas and inspiration
When you create content for your business blog, you are of course aiming to promote your own products or services. However, you are doing so with the intention of providing value to the reader first and foremost, before connecting the value content to your offers.
The Benefits of Blogging for Businesses
If you want to generate more sales, enquiries and leads through your website, you will need to do three things:
If you want to make sales through your website, you will need to captivate your audience and drive visitors to it.
Then, you need to connect with your website visitors so they know, love and trust your brand.
Finally, you need to convert your website visitors into paying customers.
Blogging allows you to do all three!
Firstly, blogs help to improve your website's visibility (ranking) in search engines such as Google. By improving your website's rankings, you can drive more organic traffic from search engines to your website. To get your blog posts to rank in search engines and drive organic traffic, you need to ensure you are creating quality content that serves the reader's needs and includes relevant keywords. You also need to apply essential SEO best practices, such as SEO titles and descriptions.
Secondly, blogs allow you to build trust with your target audience by demonstrating your experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. This is key to building the all-important know, love and trust that is needed to convert website visitors into customers.
Finally, blogs help you convert your website visitors into customers by linking your content back to your offers. By doing so, you can show your audience that you have a solution to their need, problem or desire. After all, people head to Google for solutions!
Blogging works even better when used in conjunction with other marketing channels, such as social media, Pinterest and email marketing. The customer journey is rarely linear, and almost always involves several different marketing channels. For example, you could captivate a website visitor from Google using your blog post, then connect with them using email marketing and finally make the sale through a social media post.
I have created a complimentary online course that shows you how you can use blogging to captivate, connect with, and convert your target audience into loyal clients and customers. Access my complimentary online course, Captivate, Connect & Convert With Blogging, here!
Captivate: How to Grow Your Brand Visibility With Blogging
Blogging can help you increase your website’s visibility in search engines such as Google. However, to do so, your blogs must be search engine optimised. Here is a list of things to do to ensure your blog post is search engine optimised:
Base your blog content on keyword research, so you write content that your target audience is searching for online
Include your target keywords in your SEO titles and descriptions, image alt text, headings and page copy
Implement good technical SEO. Ensure that your page URL is relevant to the post title, compress images to optimise page load speed, and use links to and from your blog post to help search engines (and website users) travel through your website and discover more content
Make it really clear that your blog article provides the information search engine users are looking for. An engaging introduction is key to keeping your audience interested enough to continue reading!
For a more in-depth look at how to captivate your target audience with blog content, read my guide on how to blog for SEO to increase your brand visibility.
Connect: How to Build Trust Through Blogging
People buy from people they trust. So, for your website to convert visitors into customers, it needs to help you build trust with your audience. Your blog is a fantastic opportunity to showcase what makes your brand trustworthy, by allowing you to highlight your credentials, real-world experience and niche expertise.
All of this helps your target audience trust your brand, and it can also help your website rank higher in search results. Here are some ways in which you can connect with your audience using blog content:
Demonstrate your real-life experience in the subject area
Show that you have the technical expertise required to be a reliable source of information on the subject area
Build up your website authority by writing guest blog posts and getting backlinks from other reputable websites in your field
Demonstrate your trustworthiness by ensuring your information is accurate, using genuine testimonials, and having good website security.
For a more in-depth guide on blogging to build the all-important know / love / trust factor, read my guide on how to use blogging to connect with your audience.
Convert: How to Make Sales With Blogging
Ultimately, you want your blogging efforts to generate sales. When done correctly, blogging can convert search engine browsers into loyal customers. Addressing their pain points, desires and reservations, demonstrating your credibility and showcasing your expertise all contribute to making sales. However, there is more you can do to drive conversions through blogging.
Ways to drive sales and conversions through blogging:
Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout your blog articles to drive people to your sales pages, newsletter sign-up form, or bookings page.
Connect your offers to the blog topic. How does your offer help the reader solve their problem or fulfil their desire? Consider why they are reading your blog article in the first place, and how your offer is linked.
Think about the type of conversion you want to generate from your blog article. It doesn’t always have to be a sale. Instead, it could be an email newsletter sign-up, webinar registration or discovery call booking.
To learn more about how you can use your blog strategy and website content to captivate, connect with and convert your target audience, take a look at my Introduction to the 3 C's Framework.
Seasonal Blogging Strategies
Blogging is a fantastic way to drive visibility, traffic and sales throughout the year, including the all-important festive shopping period! Timing your blog posts to align with seasonal trends, shopper behaviour, industry events and high-traffic periods can give your business the edge and help you drive even more sales.
Seasonal blogging is especially beneficial for products-based or ecommerce brands. This is because it can help you drive more sales for seasonal products and giftable items. I have gone into more detail about how you can use blogging to drive sales for your ecommerce business at Christmas. However, the same principles can be applied to any seasonal event, such as Valentine’s Day, summer, Father’s Day and more.
Using Blogging to Promote Your Ecommerce Business at Christmas
The biggest shopping season of the year - Christmas - is a time when every ecommerce business can reap the benefits of blogging. Timing is key - you need to ensure your content has time to index, rank and drive traffic before the peak online shopping period hits. Leaving it too late can mean online shoppers just don’t see your content in time for it to influence their purchasing decisions.
I usually recommend the following roadmap to my ecommerce clients:
July - August: Start mapping out your Christmas SEO strategy. Work out your product lines, seasonal specials (e.g. gift wrapping service), and Black Friday offers. Know when you plan to launch them.
September - October: Implement your festive SEO strategy. Publish Christmas gift guides as blog posts, optimise your Christmas gifts category / collection and product pages, and support this through email and social media marketing. Optimise your website for Christmas gifting keywords (e.g. “Christmas gifts for…” or “... Christmas gifts”).
November - December: Keep up the momentum. Continue optimising your website for Christmas gifting keywords. Adjust your email and social media strategy accordingly to focus on the products you need to sell more of. Publicise your last order dates, and use your website and other marketing channels to communicate these. Start thinking about your January sale (if relevant), and begin creating and optimising your January Sale collection / category page in the backend, so it’s ready to go when you need it.
January: Breathe! Take stock and assess what worked and what could be improved. Do NOT delete your Christmas SEO content! Leave the gift guides live on your website, and hide your Christmas gifts collection page from the website or save it to draft. Copy, paste and save any other festive content so that you can reuse it next year, and build on it. This way, you won’t need to do everything from scratch, and your Christmas SEO can get better each year.
10 Tips for Driving Organic Visibility, Traffic and Conversions Through Blogging
If you want to use blog content to captivate, connect with and convert your target audience, and drive organic visibility, traffic and sales, here are my top ten tips:
Quality over quantity. Always. Whether it’s the length of your blog posts or the frequency, quality should never be sacrificed for quantity. You’re much better off publishing one engaging, purposeful, optimised blog post each month than four naff ones.
Be consistent. Aim to publish regularly, even if it’s once a month. If you like to write your blogs in batches, schedule them to publish at regular intervals instead of setting them all live in one go.
Be human. AI can be really helpful when it comes to planning our blog content. However, you should never rely solely on AI to produce your blog posts for you. Always fact check and edit AI-produced content to make sure it is accurate and authentic. Mass-produced, poor-quality AI content will likely damage your SEO and your conversions.
Be purposeful. Every blog post should serve a purpose. If it doesn’t captivate, connect with and / or convert your target audience, then it isn’t going to support your business objectives.
Apply SEO best practices. Unless you want to spend even more effort trying to drive traffic from social media or email marketing, you will need to SEO your blog content. This will help you drive organic traffic from search engines to your website, 24/7.
Share your blog content. To support your SEO efforts, share your blog posts on social media, via email or on Pinterest. This can help you get a quick injection of traffic whilst the SEO does its thing!
Update your blog content. Content decay can affect your SEO and cause your rankings, visibility and traffic to slip. To avoid this, update your blog posts at least annually to keep them up-to-date, optimised and visible.
Timing is key. Remember that it takes time for Google to crawl, index and rank your content. Always publish seasonal or time-sensitive blog content at least a month before you need it!
Plan ahead. Blog content takes time to write, publish and work. Forward planning is your best friend here, so consider having a 3, 6 or 12 month blogging strategy to guide you.
Follow Your Passion. Don’t try to blog about the topics you find boring. Not only will it come across in your writing, but you are far more likely to procrastinate and neglect your blogging strategy.
7 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid
Now I’ve given you my top 10 blogging tips, here are 7 blogging mistakes to avoid if you want blogging to work for your business:
Poor quality content. Content that doesn’t help the reader, is too short (below 500 words), is spammy, or doesn’t serve a purpose won’t rank in Google and it won’t generate sales.
Over-promotion. Your blog content should give value before it promotes your offers. Your readers should be able to get the answers they need without feeling like they are being sold to in a pushy, spammy way.
Neglecting your blog analytics. The 80/20 rule certainly applies to blogging! You will find that 20% of your blog posts (give or take) drive 80% of the traffic and conversions. Use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to help you understand how your blog content performs.
Not having a blog strategy. Whilst you don’t have to stick rigidly to a 12-month blogging strategy, not having one at all can mean you miss key seasonal opportunities or simply forget to blog for months at a time.
Ignoring SEO. Ignore SEO at your peril. Investing time and effort into making sure your blog content is visible in Google Search means your blog posts keep driving organic traffic for months and even years, without you having to do an awful lot.
Neglecting your older blog posts. Failing to update your blog posts leads to content decay, which causes your content to slip down the rankings into Google oblivion. After all the effort you put into writing them, why not keep your blog posts updated and in the rankings? Up-to-date content is also more likely to convert!
Perfectionism. Done is better than perfect. Blogging is a long game, so you have plenty of time to update and improve your content later.
Unlock the Power of Blogging for Your Business With Purple Horse Marketing!
Blogging can help your business increase its online visibility, nurture your target audience and drive sales. By publishing quality blog content that captivates, connects with and converts your audience, you can transform your website into a revenue-generating asset.
If you want to start blogging for your small business, check out my online blogging course. Designed especially for small and independent businesses, Blogging for Small Business teaches you how to write SEO-friendly blog content and plan your business blogging strategy.
The online self-study course comes with lifetime access. Enrol in Blogging for Small Business here.
Alternatively, you receive free access to all of my online self-study courses when you join my monthly SEO membership. The SEO membership is perfect for you if you want to learn all aspects of SEO for your business website, including blogging, with the additional support of regular, live SEO training from myself, an independent SEO consultant.
This monthly membership is available for £150/month, cancel anytime. Plus, there are 3, 6 and 12-month plans available at a reduced monthly rate.
About the Author
Rhiannon is an independent SEO consultant with 5 years’ experience helping growing businesses transform their websites into revenue-generating assets. She has worked with businesses in a range of sectors, from service providers in the equestrian industry to products brands in the affordable luxury market. Rhiannon supports businesses with SEO and blog content strategy for their WordPress, Wix and Shopify websites through a range of offers from online self-study courses to bespoke marketing consultancy.
Connect with Rhiannon on Instagram @purplehorsemarketing