7 Effective Tips To Get More Business From Your Blog
Are you getting results with your blogging efforts?
Or are you spending a lot of time writing them with very few people reading them?
Although blogging can be time consuming, it has huge potential to help grow your website traffic and generate more business for you.
But there is a lot to know about blogging before you can achieve any level of success.
In this article we outline 7 practical tips that will help you achieve significantly better results and get more business from your blog.
1. Write Long Content!
If you write really detailed and useful posts, they typically get shared more often, resulting in more websites linking to them. Links from relevant, high authority sites help to get your content ranked high within Google’s search results. This is essential to ensure you give yourself every opportunity to get seen by the right people.
As it gets shared by readers, more people get to know about your content and the more people that know about your content the more likely they are to link to it.
While you may not write long masterpieces every time, if there are particular keyword groups you want to rank for that are competitive, you should consider writing a long, detailed and extremely useful article.
2. Build Your Email Subscribers
If you have an email list or subscriber database, they will be a great source of regular traffic when you email them about your latest blog post.
Email marketing is still incredibly important. While you don’t want to ignore social media, you want to make sure that email marketing is part of your promotional strategy…a big part!
Here are 3 tips for building email subscribers:
- Provide a great incentive to subscribe – a good incentive will naturally improve conversion rates, and this certainly works for Melonie who provides a Free LinkedIn Code Cheat Sheet.
- Add email subscription options to a variety of pages – Identify pages outside of your blog that get good traffic and add email subscription options to those pages. For example, you may find that your “About Us” page gets a lot of traffic. There is no reason why you shouldn’t have an email opt-in form directly on that page.
- Split test your conversion – When you set up your opt-in boxes on your website whatever conversion rate you get, can always be improved. Use a tool such as Optimizely to help you with split tests.
3. Create Custom Opt-ins Specific to a High Performing Post
We recently wrote a 5,000 word post on Google Webmaster Tools. We knew it was going to be popular so we created a special tip guide, which was about Google Webmaster Tools and provided additional information.
Within this post we then created an opt-in box that asked people to subscribe via email to get this guide.
Because this guide was directly related to the content, the conversion rate was much higher than the conversion rate would be for a generic guide.
For this post we achieved an 8.2% conversion rate. So think about what value-added downloads you can provide for your most popular posts to boost your conversion rate.
4. Implement Good Social Sharing
When you publish your blog post, you need to set up manual and automated sharing of your content to social media channels.
You will also want to strongly encourage your website visitors to share your content.
For example, as you scroll down through this post you will see that the social sharing icons on the left are always visible. This is a social sharing plugin called Digg Digg.
Make sure whatever social sharing plugin you use that it is always visible on your website, including for mobile visitors.
5. Always Link to Another Post on Your Site
It is a good practice to link to external posts, but it’s also a valuable practice for you to link to other relevant posts on your own site.
When you write a new post, try to link to a couple of related blog posts you’ve previously written. This will not only encourage your visitors to dig deeper into your site and discover more valuable content, but it will also add some value to the other posts you link to as Google takes internal links into consideration.
In addition, you should also review older posts and see if you can link from them to your new post. Google looks at (and follows) these links as every internal link adds some value to the post receiving the link.
Tip: If you were writing an article on “LinkedIn Marketing” in order to find related articles on your site go to Google and type:
“LinkedIn Marketing” site: www.meloniedodaro.wpengine.com
Replace Top Dog Social Media’s website address with yours. This will show you a list of articles on your site that mention the keywords “LinkedIn Marketing”.
Quite often we link new posts to old posts but we don’t always think of doing it the other way around!
6. Make it Easy to Comment
The more of a community you build through your blog, the more people will come back to visit your site.
To help build your community, encourage visitors to comment and interact on your blog.
It is essential however, that you make it easy for visitors to leave a comment. By using popular commenting tools such as Disqus, which many people already belong to, this will make commenting quick and easy. Barriers such as creating a new account on a less popular commenting tool, however, will have a negative effect on the number of comments you get.
As an example, on this blog Melonie has Facebook comments enabled, which also make it very easy to comment.
7. Promote Your Content
It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if you don’t promote it. Quite simply, it will not get the attention you want it too.
The methods you employ to promote your posts can be a combination of paid (e.g. Facebook ads) and/or unpaid.
For example, if you write a great piece of content related to social media for CEO’s. You would then reach out to organizations for CEO’s and tell them about the valuable piece of content you have produced for them.
Summary
A blog can be a very effective way of driving free traffic to your site and generating business for you as well as positioning you as an authority on your topic.
As I have shown you, there is a lot involved in learning how to blog successfully.
If you liked the tips above and would like to learn more, sign up now for our free upcoming webinar, where we will share even more amazing tips that will help you skyrocket the traffic and get more business from your blog.
| This post was provided by Ian Cleary who is the founder of RazorSocial, the world’s leading site for getting unbiased advice on blogging and social media. Ian’s blog was named Top 10 Social Media Blogs for 2014 by Social Media Examiner (as was Top Dog Social Media). As an award-winning tech blogger, Ian has also been published on The Huffington Post, Marketing Profs and writes regularly for Social Media Examiner. He’s also often quoted in media such as The New York Times. |
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