You have put together your marketing campaign, your social media is all in order, you have a steady flow of customers, but you just aren’t reaching the numbers you’d hope to in revenue. There is the option of offering your customers a reason to spend more time on your site, and increase their interaction with your product as well as your revenue. Blogs offer your customers an opportunity to learn more about your product, to find out specifics about how they can use it or how others use it, and even other great information that is in some way related to your products.
Here are some top tips and stepping stones to setting up a successful blog, from copywriting and blogging specialists 12Handz https://www.12handz.com/services/copywriting-and-content-marketing.
Benefits of a Blog
Blogs are great for a few reasons:
- They provide your customers with useful information about your product, or other knowledge that you find to be valuable
- They create a reason for your customers to spend more time on your site and can also provide a level of sales that might not be possible without sales associates.
- They offer a gateway for new customers in that current customers may feel compelled to share the information via their social media profiles or emails with friends, family, and co-workers.
- They bring in new potential customers by widening the range of search terms your site ranks for.
Preparing Your New Blog
Make sure that the layout of your blog is cohesive with the rest of your site. You want the blog to be able to stand alone however, it should also be easily recognizable as part of your site. Keep color schemes similar, and make sure that all images or graphic art used are high quality.
Create an editorial calendar for each month. Blogs don’t need to be updated daily with a new article, the key is to have a regular schedule and stick to it. That could be a couple of posts a week or once a month.
Make sure that each of your social media profiles are connected to the blog. There should be buttons at the top or on either sidebar inviting people to follow or like your pages. Also include a call to action after each article suggesting that if they like what they read to share it with their friends.
Maintaining Your New Blog
Setting up analytics for your blog is a necessity, and should already be set up for your site. You want to know how much time people are spending reading the articles, and you want to know which articles are being read most often, and you want to use this information to adjust your mode of operation.
There are various questions that all customers have for any given industry. Through a blog you have the ability to answer those questions and become the Go-To for that person along with their friends and family. Establishing that sort of trust translates to revenue.
Perhaps you own an eco-friendly cosmetics company that incorporates coconut oil into its products. This is an ingredient that most people are familiar with by now, they may even know some of its health benefits, but how do you use it? Is a spoonful enough? Should it be slathered over the face every night at bedtime? For any industry there will be hundreds of questions like that. Start answering them in your blog and customers will value your business even more.
Promoting Your New Blog
- Make sure to promote each new post via your social media channels. This is important because you may have followers on Facebook or Twitter that have yet to visit your blog but could turn into loyal fans.
- Send out email blasts or newsletters. This can be just to promote the article, but it’s a better option to include other information as well: The Half-Yearly Sales start June 24th, don’t pass up our 50% off deals. In the meantime, here’s a great article we just posted on our blog on How to Put Together the Right Outfit for Your Upcoming Interview.
- Reach out to other blogs that you enjoy reading to post articles on their sites with a link back to your blog. Just the same as the link building you’ve done to your homepage you need to create backlinks to the blog. There may be customers you can reach better via the blog as opposed to just being sent to the homepage of a store.
Summing up
A new blog is a great way to stimulate interest in your site. Just make sure to take the time to establish it. Once the blog is established you can automate the articles to publish. The only other suggestion out there is that you participate regularly on the site. When people leave comments or ask questions, answer them, otherwise all the work you’ve done is for naught. Customers want to know they’ll be taken care of. A blog is just one more way you can show your customers what a fantastic business you are.