If you run your own business, you will either have or be thinking about having, a blog to promote yourself. This could be a dedicated blog site or a blog that is part of your website, but either way, they will be doing the same job for you. The point of a blog is to publish interesting, valuable content that will appeal to potential customers of your business. The by-product of this main task is that a blog can be a vital tool for improving your rankings on Internet search engines. So how do you make sure your blog is maximizing its potential?
Blog or website?
The lines between the two are becoming increasingly blurry as bloggers add more pages and functionality to their blogs. The essence of the blog is that it is an online journal, or diary, where you write about your thoughts, ideas, what you’ve done, and share your knowledge with the world. Personal blogs can still fulfill this primary definition, but as the monetization of blogs and the use of blogs as promotional tools for businesses grows, so the entries can change to become a collection of informative articles on a common theme, rather than one individual’s musings. You can have a standalone blog, which is very simple to create, or a website that has a blog page, so if you want the full capabilities of having a website, you can set that up and then write your content on the blog page. A website may take a bit more time and effort to create, and the choice between the two is really down to your personal preference and what fits best for your business.
Good writing is key
Unless your blog posts are well-written, relevant, and engaging, you won’t get many followers, and you won’t make much headway in the search engine rankings. If you aren’t sure if your writing skills are up to the job, you have a couple of options. You can practice, take some classes and learn from the wealth of information online about writing good posts, or if this doesn’t appeal you can outsource the task, employing a professional writer or content company to do your posts for you. The important thing is not who writes the posts, but that they are attracting an audience and building your online profile.
Getting the SEO right
Search engine optimization is the marketing technique of including the features search engine algorithms are programmed to look for, resulting in higher rankings on search results pages. It’s perfectly possible to follow some basic guidelines on SEO for yourself, but it isn’t easy to get optimum results without using the advanced SEO techniques employed by professional optimization companies. You need to analyze whether you would be better off investing in expert input compared to going it alone – a boost for your blog can more than compensate for the expense involved. This will especially be the case if you are not getting results with your own efforts.
Blogs are popular and thriving forms of online communication and make excellent marketing tools. You just need to make sure yours is producing the best possible results for the input.
