Blogging is a highly valuable, but under-utilised, tool for driving organic, sustainable growth for independent and small businesses. Not only can it help you drive sales through your website, blogging can have long-term, long-lasting positive impacts on your business. Furthermore, it doesn’t have to cost a penny if you commit to investing the time and effort into learning how to blog 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. Ultimately, you can use blogging to transform your website into a revenue-generating asset for your business.
This guide covers:
Why Are Blogs Good for Marketing?
If you want to make sales through your website, you will need to first drive visitors to it. Then, you need to connect with those visitors and build their trust. Finally, you need to convert your website visitors into paying customers. Blogging allows you to do all three!
Firstly, blogs help you drive traffic to your website organically (for free) by improving your SEO, thereby increasing your website’s visibility in Google and other search engines. This is because blogs help show Google that your website provides helpful content for search engine users.
Secondly, blogs allow you to build trust with your target audience by demonstrating your niche expertise, knowledge and experience.
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!
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.
Firstly, you will need to carry out keyword research, to understand what your audience is searching for online. By targeting the right keywords through blog posts, you can publish content that people are actually looking for, and drive traffic to your website.
Secondly, you will need to show Google that your content is relevant to people searching for your target keyword(s). You can do this by optimising your blog posts’ SEO titles and descriptions, image alt text, headings and subheadings for those keywords.
Thirdly, you will need to make it really clear - both to Google and your readers - that your blog article gives them the information they are looking for. An engaging introduction is key to keeping your audience interested enough to continue reading!
Tips for creating blog content that is visible in search engines and will captivate your audience:
Carry out keyword research to identify topics your target audience are searching for online
Apply SEO best practices to your blog articles
Use your SEO titles and descriptions to engage your audience and encourage them to click on your blog post when they see it in the search results
Use your opening paragraph to hook your audience in and keep them on your website
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.
Tips for connecting with your audience through blog content:
Include customer testimonials and case studies
Highlight your real-world experience
Highlight your credentials - qualifications,
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 my Online Blogging Course!
So, you can see the benefits of blogging to your business. Not only does it drive visibility and traffic to your website, but it can actually help drive sales for your brand. 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 when you purchase it today, and you can either pay in full or pay in instalments. The investment is just £50 at the time of writing this blog, but you can visit the link for up-to-date pricing and to purchase. Enrol in my Blogging for Small Business online blogging course today.
Alternatively, you receive free, lifetime 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 WordPress, Wix or Shopify website, including blogging, with the additional support of regular, live SEO training from myself, a professional independent SEO consultant. This monthly membership is available for £150/month, cancel anytime. Join my monthly SEO membership today.