How to Make Your Blog Matter for Business

This is a guest post by contributing author and content writer Sue-Ann Bubacz. Today Sue-Ann shows us how we can make our blogs matter for business.

If you’re a business website owner, having a blog gives you an opportunity to establish yourself, business, and brand as an authority in your industry. But credibility is only the tip of the iceberg for the benefits of having a living, breathing blog for your site’s activity hub.

A blog run properly allows you to:

stay top-of-mind for customers,
grow your reputation, and
get in front of new potential business opportunities.

A blog is your digital content hub, anchoring your valuable content. It’s also the welcome wagon to your business. And, an excellent way to introduce the world to your business personality, products, and services. Your blog is a central touchpoint for people to find out about you. And, if handled wisely, it can lead to new customers and ongoing work.

But a business blog is a BIG JOB! Plus, there’s a lot more to it than merely publishing blog posts. If that is, you want your blog to power up your Marketing Machine. Your blog fuels effective Content Marketing to gain sales and deliver results for your business.

The way I see it, both your website and blog are key components in your valuable digital presence. And both, ultimately, are part of your larger marketing strategy and a way to build your business in the digitally connected world.

If you have a website and not a blog, the connectivity part of your digital connection hits a disconnect. Stop. In case you’ve been sleeping over the winter, you’re obviously aware that marketing today is customer-driven more than ever in history.

And what this means to you, dear business owner, is people want to connect via your digital channels. Connecting, I hate to remind you, is a two-sided discovery, so your stagnate blog-less web presence just won’t cut it in 2020.

[bctt tweet=”Having a blog gives you an opportunity to establish yourself, business, and brand as an authority in your industry.” via=”no”]

Your Blog is An Extension of Your Business

Positioning your blog to market your business isn’t that hard to do. Your bigger business picture gives you a framework for developing a blog content strategy that aligns with your company’s mission and goals.

Make sure you hone in on a core message to differentiate your business and communicate your brand (product or service) with clarity, consistency, and universally.

Establish a singular (exact) understandable message so anyone who hears your name will know exactly what you’re about.

With business objectives to guide your content, selecting key categories for your blog and finding topics flows easily, as well as helps you structure your site’s architecture for ease of use.

Of course, ease of use is one of the “people-pleaser, your customers market for you,” aspects of your blog design, but it also addresses search engine needs. SEO or search engine optimization is part of website and blog marketing so adopting content maps to reinforce what your site is about, helps people and search engines find and understand you. And that’s important!

As a bonus, using these content structuring techniques also help you develop a viable content strategy for your business blog. Take a look at these pro resources to get you going:

Anil from Bloggers Passion brings you SEO-lead content silos for site structure.
Hubspot explains content clusters in this quick YouTube video.
Mike Allton gives you his Pyramid Content Strategy to structure a successful blog.
Use this ahrefs guide for creating evergreen content and also to find out why.

Don’t get too hung up on SEO though, especially at first, because other factors matter, and in this SEO Basics post, Andy Crestodina explains what I mean. He talks about important search factors like:

Authenticity, authority, credibility
Keyword phrases coupled with quality content = enormously relevant content
Social signals/user impacts

Content Clusters to Drive Clarity

Grouping your content by using any of these techniques, forces you to dig deeper into any given topic, but helps you narrow your focus at the same time. I like the idea of thinking about the pillar content page (or some people prefer all posts) or cornerstone content pieces to also skew to evergreen as well, if at all possible. This gives you a sturdy long-term anchor for the central or hub piece of content for each key topic.

Remember to keep user-intent in your mind for the content you create so that the content is always helpful and answers questions people are looking for via search. Keep track of questions your customers or clients often ask, questions you see in industry groups, or questions that relate to one another.

Offer original ideas or unique perspectives highlighting your expertise and allowing you to stand out in your industry. It’s hard to bring something new or unique to the conversation but, that’s an essential element to good share-worthy content. Publishing shallow content for content’s sake is never a good idea or winning method.

While it’s great to offer content as a media mix, it’s also a good idea to start with one type of content where you excel and then build from there, adding as you go and grow.

Additionally, in my opinion, all content starts with solid writing skills at its foundation. So start there. Maybe this post on my favorite writing apps on my friend, Saurabh’s, website will give you some helpful writing tools to try out! No matter what, it’s never too soon to start grabbing ideas, saving resource links, and reading.

The more you start thinking, and the more content-aware you are, the better things will go when you plan and implement your successful business blog.

[bctt tweet=”Offer original ideas or unique perspectives highlighting your expertise and allowing you to stand out in your industry.” via=”no”]

Unique is No-Repeat

There’s one thing you need to be aware of and maybe, beware of, in mapping out your content plan and digging in from every single angle. Cannibalizing your content by having the same keyword or keyword phrase means you are competing against yourself (on your site!) for ranking for a word or phrase. This isn’t good practice, but you may not have known about this, or it may even be happening by mistake, so please note this now.

Julia McCoy of Express Writers talks about the topic in this video.

If you find you have duplicate use of keywords or phrases on your site, Julia suggests you:

1- update and merge content into a single stronger piece… combine into the best (strongest) one to make it even better quality.

Hint: 301 redirects from the URL you are getting rid of… change meta/title, etc as needed to improve.

Hint: Find and redirect all 404 or other bad links to the relevant and current pages on topics.

2- use a tool like screaming frog to audit your entire set for 404 and other content delivery problems, duplicate kw, etc. …upgrade and update for better site ROI.

Keep this in mind because you don’t want to dilute your content punch. Use a specific content hierarchy instead to solve this issue.

Additional Resource: Yoast on Content Audit Strategy and Cannibalization

If you follow methods for site structure, aligning content with business goals and objectives, and resolve to craft helpful and original content, plus strive for relevancy, you’re on the right track.

Is your blog a go?