In recent years, blogging has proven to be one of the most valuable tools within the digital marketing strategy of companies that want to grow and increase their sales in a productive and lucrative way. A blog analysis and monitoring company, more than 175,000 blogs are published daily and 1.6 million posts are published. Amazing, right? If you do not know how to create a blog and still do not have one, it can be a problem. Do not panic with numbers, blogs are valuable for companies to build a lasting and trusting relationship with consumers and potential customers. Besides being an excellent way to generate leads and opportunities for your sales team.
But to generate leads and sell more, it is important to have a good blog organized, attractive and constantly updated. Therefore, we create a complete and detailed content, providing all the knowledge you need to create a successful blog and potentialize your content and digital marketing strategy.
WHY ARE BLOGS IMPORTANT?
The forms of communication have changed over the years. The time when brands only spoke and consumers only listened is past. Today, the communication and marketing process is two-way: Consumers also speak and companies also listen.
Therefore, it is important for any company to create a channel that generates these relationships, through visits and educating those visitors through relevant content. But first, we go in parts. A friendly company is always remembered.
WHAT PROVES THAT THE BLOGS CAN HELP ME?
The number of companies that invested in digital marketing and inbound marketing has grown considerably over the years. We are talking about various businesses, small businesses, SMEs and large companies, all of them perceived the importance of designing their brands online and be seen in blogs as a powerful tool. But how?
- Positioning and recognition
- Direct and simple
Create a blog and update it with relevant content helps your business to be found in the queries that are made in the search engines. Quality content attracts the attention of Google and visitors who require information. Some companies concerning the software administration and finance, demonstrate how they increased traffic and the correct use of tools marketing automation and how the conversion was essential for the newly launched brand, create recognition and generate more leads qualified for the sales team.
How to create a blog on WordPress?
WordPress is the main market platform, with more than 53 million blogs published each month with a community of more than 409 million people reading over 19.8 million pages each month. Creating a new blog in WordPress is really very simple. The first step is to access www.wordpress.com and click on create the site. The creation process is simple:
Choose a name for your blog (like ours is Content Marketing)
- Register with your name
- Password
- Choose your preferred template.
- The process is simple and several attractive templates are available.
How to create a Blogger?
Blogger, also known as Blogspot, is a free Google publishing platform that works in integration with your Gmail account. Despite also being well known, it is less used for corporate blog, however, it is still worth checking out. To create a blog is really very easy. The first step is to have an account with Gmail and enter www.blogger.com. With the login made, click on the new blog. And choose the title, address and the theme or model of the blog. Super simple! and the theme or model of the blog. Super simple!
EXTRA TIP: WHAT DOMAIN TO USE FOR YOUR BLOG?
One of the most frequent questions is about what domain to use for the blog. There are some options, of which not all are recommended. But one thing is a general rule: a good blog, serious, that inspires confidence should not be something like nor. The first step is to use your own domain
CHOOSING THE BEST HOST
Hosting your blog may not seem so important to have good results with your content marketing strategy, but think: this can make all the difference. Good hosting services are valuable weapons to position your site well and ensure that your visitors have stability and quality when accessing your blog. Well, it's important but what difference does it make in practice? First, Google considers dozens of different aspects of organizing the indexing in searches and one of them is the quality of navigation.
When a site does not have a quality hosting, that is to say, it is unstable, it has constant drops, delay to load the page, because of the quality of the connection, this site appears in lower positions in searches and that is never good, mainly for your SEO strategy. The first step is to choose the right hosting for your needs and for your blog platform. In the case of WordPress, for example, the platform we use for our blog, there are specialized hosting services. Services for specific platforms have better integration with the format and content, which generates better hosting.
IT'S TIME TO TALK ABOUT THE CONTENT
Creating a blog is not limited to placing a site on the air with a very good hosting and an attractive subject. The truth, those are just a very valuable tool for your digital marketing strategy and you need to have results.
Define a clear objective
The first step is to define what the main purpose of your blog is. Having a clear objective is the only way to define what success means for your content strategy. Some of the objectives that we see daily in Rock are: generate leads, attract traffic, become a reference, educate customers and increase brand recognition.
Define your people
Every business has an ideal client and every blog has an ideal visitor. Creating people, also semi-formal profiles of people who buy your product are the best way to get the language of your texts right and create a more effective content that really has value for visitors to your blog. To create buyer people we cannot make assumptions. It is necessary to conduct searches, interviews and collect data systematically with clients and prospects to know in detail what the characteristics of your visitor or ideal audience are. Many questions can be asked, but it is always important to remember that these vary according to your business. However, there is one of them that cannot be absent: how is it that your product or service helps to improve the life of your client?
Plan your content
We have already defined two important steps and now we need to put content production into practice. It is important to remember that the planning and strategy of content production are linked to your personal and the sales funnel. The first step to start the production of any type of content is to know well in which stage of the funnel is your person and what kind of content is interesting for this stage.
SEO, OPTIMIZING THE CONTENT
SEO (search engine optimization) has a very simple objective: to optimize your content to improve your position in organic Google searches for example. When they are applied, the techniques of content optimization for search engines have good results, but remember that these are a part of a whole. Let's see a little more about what makes up SEO.
Head vs long tail
The basis of optimization is given by a keyword. That is a word that defines the theme of your blog post. This can be divided into two groups: long and short, but also, these are directly related. Keywords head tail, are the base words for publications. You summarize the general theme of the publication and help the visitor to decide if that post is interesting or not for what he is looking for.
Long tail keywords are longer variations of the head and refine the search on a topic. For example, in this post we talk about how to create a blog, we can assume that we are talking about: how to create a blog in WordPress or how to create a blog in blogger. They are more specific versions of the same keyword.
How Google works?
When starting with the use of SEO as a tool for blogs and sites, it was very common to saturate the texts with keywords that were repeated tirelessly and meaningless phrases that do not add anything to the content. Today, Google's algorithm is very smart. It is not possible to deceive him. Now, the search algorithm not only needs keywords in texts, but it analyzes in context and the relevance of this topic to the user.
Therefore, it is not enough to fill your text with repetitive content, you need to build the context and the relevance for the reader because this is the crucial factor to position yourself in the results. Today what Google is looking for to index and position the sites is quality. Using SEO techniques it is possible to define the topics well and know what is the basis of the content that will be developed, but always remember that this content must be relevant to you.
BLOG READY AND NOW?
Having a well-updated blog is a constant job. It is necessary to revisit the old publications whenever there is any new material related to the published, create links with CTAs for rich materials published later, such as ebooks and whitepapers. Some practices can be applied regularly to ensure that your texts are well positioned and up-to-date.
A good topic should be:
Simple
If your blog is very confusing, surely you will have more difficulty attracting readers and retain those you already have, which will impact your conversion rates.
Responsive
Nowadays there are more users who access the Internet from mobile devices than from desktops and laptops. That's why the chosen theme of your blog should be easily adjusted to different screen sizes and mobile devices.
Quick
Although most topics will not affect the speed of your blog, it is important to conduct some tests. After all, nobody likes to enter slow websites, right?
About the Author
Tom Sanders, of doit4state.com studied business and engineering at the New York Maritime College. His passion lies in educating, entertaining and empowering anyone who wants to learn.
