For those running small businesses, or for in-house marketers working across the marketing mix, time is a commodity in short supply. Add to this, a common lack of confidence in command over the written word, a lack of understanding of the importance of blogs and how to effectively write one, and it’s easy to see why many businesses neglect to harness their power.
While blog writing is typically tackled agency-side by Copywriters, it’s the opinion of this writer that in order to get more businesses involved and able to reap the advantages of blogging, copywriting and blogging should be considered separate entities. Bringing us to our first point.
1. You Don’t Have to be Camus
Your blog is where the voice of your brand lives. While brand voice should of course be considered carefully across all copy published by your business, your blog is where it can be amplified, and where it can exist in its rawer form.
We’re not aiming for genius prose here. But we’re not looking for speech-like writing as though you’re chatting at a local pub either.
Your blog is where you can pull back the curtain a little, lending a genuine, authentic personality to your brand and business. This particular point is a great example of the importance of blogs – offering your users a more intimate relationship with the brand. For small business owners, who better to do this than you?
The low bar to writing-entry is one of the many advantages of blogging for you, the organisation. It doesn’t take a novelist to engage your readers with interesting pieces about things happening within your business and industry, helpful pieces related to your products/services and the problem your business solves etc.
So, put your concerns on ice, get tapping on that keyboard, and let the voice of your business flow from your fingers.
2. You Can Make it Yours – But Should Still Prep Properly
Don’t want to write lengthy paragraphs? Then don’t.
Want to write in short snappy single line sentences? Go for it – (Though you’d need a whole lot of single line sentences to optimise for a high-volume term – more on this later)
These choices will begin to develop your style, and content with an engaging style and voice is far more likely to engage your audience in a meaningful way. One of the many advantages of blogging is the ability to trial different styles of content, both in terms of topics, and in terms of style, and gauge audience response. This enables you to tailor your output and style to your users.
However you want to approach it, weave your industry knowledge and passion for the business and the work you do through your interesting, insightful, or helpful blog content, providing clear call to actions, and you’ll begin to generate engagement, leads and conversions.
First, start with a quick plan.
Quick Plan
The importance of blogs also, in part, lies in their ability to educate and inform. They should answer questions users are actually searching for (if optimised effectively – more on this later), and questions users are likely to have about the topic you’re writing about. As such plans are key.
- What product/service of yours will this blog closely relate to, or drive the user towards?
- Do your research – find similar competing blogs/articles on the same topics.
- Look at their content, the topics they’re tackling – write them down.
- Consider your own experience, and add the key points you feel should be discussed.
- Consider (or research) common questions being asked around this topic and plan to tackle these with dedicated headings if appropriate.
- Is it relevant to discuss how your organisation approaches the service/product/topic you’re discussing? If so, plan out the insights you’re going to include.
3. From “Copy” to Conversions
The importance of blogs doesn’t just lie in their ability to improve your positioning. They’re incredible conversion generating tools, when approached correctly.
Like all website copy, well-crafted blogs should have a goal. It’s not enough to just come up with a nifty blog idea and an ‘angle’ that you think will generate engagement from your audience. It has to drive the user to take an action, whether that’s taking a top of funnel, cursory glance at a page to build interest, or making a committed action to buy/enquire.
To ensure you feel the advantages of blogging, ask yourself one critical question whenever you begin working on one:
- What action is the blog intended to drive the user towards?
There are often multiple. For example, for the user to visit:
The contact page (for service businesses)
The service/product pages most relevant to the blog content (which should have their own buy/enquire conversion points) – there may be multiple of these throughout the blog.
Writing Copy that Converts
With your plan from point 2, your audience, the action you want them to take, and the pages of your website relevant to the blog, established, you can begin the writing.
A critical factor when exploring the importance of blogs is their ability to drive the user to take action. Your copy itself is the ultimate way of achieving this.
- Consider your title (H1) carefully for ultimate engagement and optimisation (more on this later)
- Use subheadings to improve readability, and help scan-readers to easily find the content they’re interested in. You can use questions your users are searching for, which is also a good optimisation technique.
- In terms of writing, the goal is often to find the balance of providing insight and interest, and selling/marketing, without it being any kind of sales pitch. For example, the blog could be about the important role of a particular service across your sector, and would cover this topic generally – positioning you as knowledge leaders. However, further down the piece, you may include your organisation’s approach to the service, or what makes your organisation’s process unique compared to others in the sector.
- Include call to actions (CTA’s), both in the text where appropriate, and in terms of on-page elements like banners, buttons, and contact forms to nudge your users towards conversion points and help further reap the advantages of blogging.
What Do Blog CTA’s Look Like?
For businesses selling products online, for example, a blog about a particular product-type to market your latest product, would have a goal of driving conversions (driving users towards that product page, perhaps the category page/range page it belongs to, and clicking the buy button).
But how are you going to lead the reader to those pages? With killer, engaging blog copy that informs, engages, and inspires – and with a clear call to action!
To reap the advantages of blogging, you should at least end each blog with a clear action that you want the reader to take. “Check out our XX service/product today” – with a link or button to an appropriate dedicated page, “Contact our team today to learn how we can help” – with a contact form or link/button to the contact page.
You should also include CTA’s throughout the piece, to nudge readers towards pages of your website they can explore related to the blog topic, and the particular subjects covered under particular subheadings (H2/3’s).
We’d recommend adding these CTAs in bold, italics or a different colour/formatting along with a clear button or link to the relevant website page.
Links
Internal links (key for optimisation – more on this later – and user journey), while not considered CTA’s, are in essence, a very subtle form of one. You should add links from words or phrases in your piece to the relevant website and blog page of your website.
Starting to see the importance of blogs now? Each element of your blog can be a tree to a relevant conversion point.
4. From Copy to Communities
The advantages of blogging don’t just extend to supporting your positioning and increasing lead generation/sales. They also help to build a community around your business too.
These communities change enormously from business to business, dependent on the size and nature of your organisation.
If you’re selling products, communities can grow to include brand-loyal consumers and influencers not only sharing your content, but creating their own featuring your brand and products.
If you’re providing services, online communities may look more like a large growing network of existing and prospective clients, suppliers, partners, and industry professionals, engaging with your content and sharing it into their networks.
No matter what these communities look like, they are of enormous benefit to the businesses that take the time to develop them, and blogs written to convert, with an engaging style and voice, could play a central part in the development of your own.
5. Blog Content = Credibility
Credibility is a key factor when analysing the importance of blogs.
While your business’s reputation is unlikely to hang entirely on the credibility of your blog section, blogging and credibility are very much connected.
Landing on a business’s website, hitting the blog, and seeing that the latest post was written 2 years ago, doesn’t fill a user with confidence. To ensure you’re establishing your credibility effectively, blogging about industry happenings, business news/changes, and mining the topics relevant to your organisation and customers/clients, is key.
Guilty of having a tumbleweed blog section? To a user, a busy business is a credible business they can trust. So look busy!
6. Build Credibility with Guest Blogging
One of the advantages of blogging is they don’t HAVE to be written by you.
You could hire a copywriter *waves* and work with them via discovery documents to ensure pieces contain your thoughts and insights, or you could also lean on guest blogging.
Guest blogging is another great way to build credibility with your blogging.
By reaching out to other knowledge leaders, notable figures in your industry, or sector influencers, asking them to write a guest blog on a topic within their specialism and relevant to your business/audience, you can provide hugely valuable content, and ramp up your credibility.
7. Optimisation = Greater Results
So far, we’ve covered that the importance of blogs lies in their ability to: give users a more intimate relationship with the business, communicate impactfully with your readers, drive readers to conversion (sale and lead generation), develop positioning, build credibility and beyond.
When you add optimisation to the equation, you can turn your blogs into organic traffic-generating tools, working as silent salespeople directing people to your website from the world of search.
How to Optimise Your Blogs
Optimising your blogs for real life search terms, and questions users may have related to your business and the topics your blog may cover, is a fantastic organic traffic generator.
We advise that optimisation is considered, along with the topic and goals of the piece, before you begin writing, so the key term can be weaved through the copy naturally and considered in your planning.
Optimised blogs should be between 700-100+ words, and should contain copy, titles, subheadings, URL’s and image alt tags, optimised with a chosen keyword (or even multiple keywords – when you gain experience).
Identify a keyword – One of the advantages of blogging – when optimising them – is their ability to generate traffic. Keywords are the mechanism for this. We cover the keyword research process in great detail in our guide to the importance of keyword research. Follow this guide to demystify the keyword research process.
Optimise your copy – With your keyword identified, it’s time to optimise your content with it. Your keyword should be in your title, a number of your subheadings, your URL, and naturally weaved within your blog copy. In around 800 words, use 9/10/11 keyword placements, and increase this count reasonably as content expands. You can learn much more about the content optimisation process in our guide.
Page optimisation elements – As part of the importance of blogs lies in their ability to generate traffic, page optimisation is a key factor you should not skip over. Page optimisation features include inbound and outbound links, and image alt tags, your URL, and your SEO title and Meta description, which should all be optimised with your keyword. Explore the page optimisation process in our guide.
Tracking and measurement – If you’re going to the effort of optimising your blogs – and you definitely should – you should also measure the performance of your blogs by tracking your used keyword in one of the many tools available online. We use Moz at The Marketing Optimist. Tracking enables you to continuously improve your existing content and new output, and measure how well you’re ranking for tracked keywords.
By pairing keyword tracking, with website metrics from Google Analytics and Search Console, you can measure the impact of your blogging. This enables you to understand if they’re generating page visits, conversions, enquiries etc. You can learn more about SEO reporting in our guide.
Need Help?
Hopefully you’re now raring to go – and your team or significant others are currently wondering why you’re giving your keyboard bedroom eyes.
If, however, you’ve gotten to the end of this and now understand the importance of blogs, but need help to harness their power, contact our team today and our skilled copywriters could soon be behind the voice of your brand.
