by guest writer Kathy Kane, Market Insights, LLC
Many businesses are considering blogs to help with building site traffic, search engines and just to have some fresh content available about their organization. You can create a blog rather quickly and once you get the format you like, you can add articles quickly. But have you thought the whole process through?
Some Items To Consider
- How many times a month will you write your blog? I suggest at least once a week for most businesses to see a difference in their web site stats. If you have a new site that you want to get up and running or a tough industry to break through on key words, you may want to consider once a day for a period of time until you start ranking in the search engines. Make sure if you don’t have time, you assign someone to do this for you.
- Consider Your Topics. The easiest way to strategize this is to write down all your services and products you want to become searched for. Each of these should become a topic or sub-topics to create your article and to help plan your writing schedule. What Links Are You Going To Use? Are you trying to drive traffic to your web site, your social sites (Facebook, Twitter, You tube, ect) or do you want to back link to past blog articles? (Like this!)
- Keywords are still important. Make sure to use your key words at least 5-6 times in your blog and use the tags and SEO within your blog to note them again, with the search standards always changing, now the big bloggers know you can’t just keep repeating keywords without being thrown out of the rankings. Your content needs to be relevant, concise and relate back to your title.
- What Is Your Call to Action For Each Blog? Decide what you want to accomplish in each blog. Do you want to promote location, drive web or social traffic, have someone call, collect an e-mail, inspire them to comment, increase your product or service sales, serve as an archive or simply to help your customers?
Other items to make sure you include:
- A Great Headline (hint…. use your key words and location you want to rank for)
- Research your topic! Get a few opinions on what you are writing about before you start writing.
- Relate your topics to the web site you’d like to promote and include relevant links
- Your first paragraph should have no more than 45 words. Your blog should be 250-500 words but the more content the better. Your keyword should appear in your first sentence.
- Use bullets/numbers and spacing to make it look interesting
- Use photos (make sure to keyword your photos) and video embedding to depict your topic.
- Make your point fast and clear in the first sentence!
- Be consistent! Whether you blog daily, weekly or monthly, do it so those following your blog will expect it at a certain time.
- Inform, don’t try to persuade.
Never copy another blog word for word to your blog! It’s plagiarism and Google does not approve either. If you move your blog, make sure you delete all prior blog entries so you don’t get ignored by the search engines for duplicate content.
Always end your blog with a link to your business site and your name (if you are trying to rank for these items, it helps people get in touch with you fast)
Do you want to make revenue from your blog? You can add code from Google ad sense and get paid when others click on your blog ads; the same is true for many referral systems like Amazon and other like business. You can also charge for banner ads for referral businesses on a monthly basis with a link to their site. I believe if you help others they will help you, so I include referral businesses in a partner’s page in my blog with a simple reciprocal link as payment.
And by the way, Google has announced they are changing up their search results, again to include higher/varied ranking for mobile sites, so make sure yours site is mobile friendly!
