Online Marketing Basics for Small Business: Week 3 – Blogging

In this third part of a five-part series on online marketing for small business, we will look at blogging and content marketing. iMedia Connection found that “60% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from it”, with over 75 per cent of marketers utilising a blog as an aspect of their content marketing. Blogging is crucial for small businesses that wish to communicate with their customer base and raise their business’ SEO rankings.

What Is Blogging?

A blog is a group of articles that are specifically targeted to a special area or industry. Blog content is regularly updated, and for small businesses it is an effective communication tool between your business and your customers, keeping customers up-to-date with helpful content such as recent industry news and any special offers you are making.

Why Should I Start To Blog?

Posting basic items on your blog like useful tips, discounts or the most recent industry news can satisfactorily maintain your customer relationships and provide people with a good reason to come to to your website. However, in recent times, blogging and content marketing has also been utilised to boost a business’ SEO. Composing articles around your target keywords will enhance your rankings in search engines.

Further, if you publish distinctive and constructive articles, other websites will choose to link to your content, and this will enhance your website’s backlinks as a result. As well as blogging on your own website, you could also feature as a guest blogger on websites that are relevant to your target market. Providing articles assists the other blog to provide valuable content, and it aids you in positioning yourself as an industry expert. These guest articles can also link back to your own website, which will generate traffic and is excellent for improving your SEO.

What You Can Expect Once You Start Blogging

To get your blog to really work well for your business, you will need to make sure you are posting regularly. This needs commitment, but if you map out a plan, you can provide new content a number of times per week without trouble. Once you have established a routine of article-posting, you will begin to get an understanding of what sort of content works most effectively for your business. You will build a strong audience of followers who’ll add comments to your articles and join in with the topic of discussion. This feeling of community is excellent for building credibility and improving SEO, and as a result you will see your rankings improve accordingly.

To blog successfully and to gain a strong online following, you need to already have good existing exposure, or grow this by posting very frequently. This may require dedication, but there are certain tricks that can help make producing content less burdensome. Despite the big commitment, blogging and content marketing is a key factor towards establishing strong rankings on search engines and an online presence.

As web developers, Sydney digital agency Magicdust are regular bloggers on the ways in which their own clients can make improvements to their websites and to their online marketing strategies, so take a look at what they have to say.