5 Blog Strategies to Get Your Business Noticed

[This article was written by Kaelee Nelson.]

You have a great business idea, created a startup company, and are ready to serve customers—now, how do you get noticed? Many entrepreneurs who are getting their first start in the business world tend to focus on expensive marketing strategies to increase their visibility. However, it may be possible to achieve the same results with less money spent through the art of blogging.

Blogs are a little-known strategy for success in business, but they need to be used with tact. We’re going to cover five ways you can carefully use a blog to get your business noticed online. These strategies can help drive more traffic to your website, so you can then convert more visitors into paying customers, earn higher revenue, and increase overall profitability. Keep reading to learn more about how you can strengthen your bottom line with blogging.

1. Employ Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In today’s digital domain, maximizing your online visibility is all a matter of search engine optimization. Essentially, SEO refers to the various methodologies that can help you rank higher on the search engine results page (known as the “SERP”).

If someone searches for a product or service you offer, you want to make sure that your listing appears as high as possible to grab their attention before clicking on a competitor’s page. But blogging can expand your search potential by creating relevant content that solves a user’s query.

Let’s say you’re in the business of selling blue light glasses on an eCommerce platform. Rather than directly targeting search terms such as “office glasses” or “lenses for computer”, you could write an article about how blue light can damage vision or impair sleep, for example. You could also create an editorial post along the lines of “XX Essentials to Feel Great at Work” and include a reference to your frames to push visitors down the sales funnel.

It’s important to use keyword research when deciding how to fill your blog. There are free tools available online that display the monthly search volume for a given term; find opportunities that relate to your specific industry and strategically incorporate them within title tags and headers so they’re read more easily by the search engine.

You should know that a lot of SEO involves long-term strategies that are designed to drive sustainable, organic growth. This means you won’t necessarily see the same overnight results that a pay-per-click campaign might achieve, but it’s significantly cheaper and far more holistic than big advertising dollars.

2. Create Content That Earns Links

There are on-page, off-page, and technical elements pertaining to SEO practices. User-facing blog content filled with targeted keywords represents one facet of on-page methodologies, while link-building campaigns are one of the most effective off-page strategies you can use to get more attention.

Link-building is the process of getting other businesses to link back to your website.

The volume of one-way hyperlinks (also known as backlinks) that direct to your website is a strong ranking factor in the search algorithm, or how the search engine decides what to display on the SERP. It’s seen as what’s called an “authority signal”, or rather, an indicator that your page is legitimate and contains accurate, trustworthy information—as opposed to spam sites that are often misleading or attempt to “cheat the system” with keyword stuffing.

Bloggers know the value of link placement, so it’s in their interest to choose their references wisely. So how do you create content that earns links? Here are some tips:

• Do your research. Tie facts and statistics together to reveal unique insights that haven’t been heard before. It may require some grunt work, but the pay off for original material will be worth the effort.
• Use catchy titles. Avoid “clickbait”, but know how to use language and rhetoric to evoke human emotions. Adjectives like shocking and surprising will intrigue audiences, but listicles that provide “XX” ideas are also effective (Pro Tip: odd numbers tend to drive a higher click-through rate than even numbers).
• Offer guest posts. Another way you can drop a link to your site is by writing a guest post and promoting it to another blogger. The ability to publish your content will save them a ton of time while still offering their readers new material—but make sure the quality is to the nines if you want your submission to get approved.

3. Stay Current with the Times

You can also generate interest and earn more links by writing about topics that are relevant to the times. News updates, societal trends, must-watch TV shows—everything is game. This summer, one topic you might write about is all the various fallout side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. More people are working from home, searching for ways to stay entertained, looking for health and safety tips, so on, and so forth. Below you see how MySmartMove displays trending topics at the top of their blog for users to have easy access to relevant topics.

How has coronavirus affected your business or it’s target audience? Can you offer advice, support, or discounted prices for impacted customers? This can help your blog gain more traction and position your philanthropic company as deserving of patrons’ trust.

4. Pay Attention to the Fold

In the example above, you can see how the blog’s homepage strategically optimizes user experience (UX) within the space above the fold—or, the portion of the site you can see displayed in the window before scrolling downward. “Above the fold” content should grab their attention with display buttons that are easy to navigate; otherwise, the odds of them scrolling down the page and engaging with your content are rather slim.

Additionally, use the below the fold space on other pages on your business site to promote your blog posts. You can see a great example of this below. Objective Wellness uses their Objective Calm Stomach product page to promote their blog posts below, allowing users to navigate back and forth between product pages and blog posts.

Also, if visitors immediately exit the session and return to the SERP in search of a higher quality experience, it could negatively impact your “bounce rate”, one of many ranking factors that can hurt your online visibility.

5. Harness the Power of Social Media

Finally, even though content marketing and social media marketing are two separate channels, you can use your online profiles to promote your blog to drive more traffic. In many cases, this strategy is much more effective than email marketing campaigns that often rub audiences as “spammy”—especially if you’re targeting Millennial users. Simply create a 1:1 cover photo that aesthetically fits into your feed, then add a hyperlink or “LINK IN BIO” description to direct users to the relevant content.

Before implementing any of these blogging strategies, remember to set up tracking tags that enable you to monitor key performance indicators (KPI) of your marketing campaign. By gathering these metrics—such as the age/gender of your average user, or where the most traffic is coming from—you can adjust your approach for data-driven results that yield the most success.

Author Bio:

Kaelee Nelson received her Master degree with an emphasis in Digital Humanities and pursues her career as a writer in San Diego, currently writing for 365businesstips.com. She enjoys informing readers about topics spanning industries such as technology, business, finance, culture, wellness, hospitality, and tourism.