Your inbound marketing strategy can’t take off without great marketing content, and your business blog shouldn’t be ignored. Research has found that companies that blog generate 55% more website visitors, 97% more inbound links, and have 434% more indexed pages than companies that don’t. Even if you’re posting once a week, you may not have leveraged the full power of content creation for your small business brand. Here are some best practices.

1. Blogging Frequency

Does your business blog tend to be neglected when things get busy? We recognize that small business owners rarely have much free time, but research has indicated that regular blogging is necessary in order to see real results. Don’t overload yourself by committing to an aggressive posting strategy. Even if you can only post once or twice weekly, making a commitment and sticking to it is necessary for success.

2. Optimizing search for each blog

Google handles over 100 billion searches each month. That doesn’t even account for searches on Bing or Yahoo! Are you actively working to ensure your content is can be found by people who need your product or service solution? It’s no secret that business blogging is a powerful tool for gaining and maintaining a high search ranking. If you’re not leveraging internal linking, keyword research, tags and other SEO strategies to ensure your content can be found by search users, your inbound marketing strategy could be suffering.

3. Not Leveraging Social Media

So you’ve built a blog on a sub-domain of your website. But nobody is reading your writing! If you’re not promoting your content on social media, you could be missing out on quite a few opportunities for visibility. Maybe some of your social media followers just don’t know the content exists! Make social media promotion part of your blogging strategy.

4. Google Analytics.

Are you looking at your Google Analytics? It can seem tempting to push metrics to the back burner, but not analyzing success on a regular basis could seriously hurt your ROI. You should be tracking your analytics like traffic,  new visitors, returning visitors and sources of your page views and whether you’re generating inbound links. You shouldn’t try to argue with the data, and your blog metrics are going to give you the best insight into how you can improve your ROI.

 

If you still are unclear about blogging and don’t have the time to blog on a regular basis, contact us. We are the blogging experts!