Blogging as an Effective Online Marketing Tool

Blogging is for everyone who has something useful to say that others will like to read. Blogging for business is now hugely popular amongst online marketers because they’ve found blogging as an effective online marketing tool. You can get these benefits too if you blog the right way. Here is what you can do.

Create a Blog: You have a choice either to create a free blog from Blogger, WordPress or some other free blogging platforms online or you invest in your own unique blog domain. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but what really matters is how to post your blogs regularly and unhindered in their visibility online and it allows you to effectively promote your products and or services as you want.

Have a Blogging Plan: A planned blog is a more effective blog. You can therefore plan out your blog topics ahead of time with clear writing and posting schedules. Your audience is always expectant and in order not to disappoint and lose their following, you must give them what they expect from you on schedule. That is where planning your blog is very essential. You must dedicate specific times to blogging and stick with the schedule. That is the best way to avoid time crush that can force you to deliver poor quality blogs and even out of schedule.

Source Topics/Ideas from Your Customers: Let’s face it, the real reason you blog is to satisfy an audience. That audience is made up of mostly customers and potential customers. Your blog is effective if you post what they want to read. The best way to know what they want to read is through FAQs from your customers. Some of these FAQs can become potential blog posts. It is such blog content that can be really informative and helpful to your readers. If you blog about issues you know your customers really care about, your blog becomes much easier and less time-consuming to write even without compromising quality.

Build an Audience for your Blog: From this audience, you can have your own contact and email list. These are very useful tools for online marketing. You can segment and market more effectively to an audience you’ve build up over time yourself. Once your blogs posts are relevant, qualitative, educational and informative enough, your audience of loyal followers will grow naturally.

Promote your Blog Content: You can take advantage of online communities to promote your blog. When a blog is not deliberately promoted, it is less effective. You can take full advantage of social media to promote your blog and grow its following. Social media posts can be the perfect vehicles to drive readers to your blog content. If you join social media groups that have an affinity to your business objectives, they can feed your blog interaction.

Outsource Blogging Responsibilities: For some people, blogging can be a very tedious exercise. If you are in this category, you can outsource your blogging responsibilities to professional/freelance bloggers at mutually agreed terms which may include but not limited to paying some fees. That takes the burden of tedious blog writing off your back and it makes it much easier to keep your blog updated with smart content and on schedule too.

Make Only Easy-To Read Posts: The big secret about blog effectiveness is that people don’t necessarily want to read.  They simply want useful information. Not many readers have the time and patience to read long and complicated articles. For this reason, a blogger must always strive to make easy to read blogs. Expert bloggers recommend the use of short paragraphs, breaking up long sentences and the use of appropriate formatting for blogs to make for easy reading and comprehension. After writing a blog post, you may choose to read it out loud yourself. That way, you can easily identify if the content doesn’t flow as expected.

Encourage Feedback from your Readers: Encouraging feedback from your readers is a great way to keep them engaged and to collect useful information for your blogging efforts. Have close relatives and friends read your blog and give useful advice how it can be improved upon particularly in terms of content and style. If you want to do exceptional work in your blog, you need to get sincere inputs from some other persons who believe in you.

Consider Guest-Blogging: For more inbound traffic, you can reach out to other marketers and reach a deal as a guest blogger. Guest blogging can help you to feed your own blog readership because when blog readers see your posts on associated websites, they follow the links to your blogs. Guest blogging helps to build your online reputation. That translates to more inbound traffic to your own blog.

Pay attention to your Industry: Paying attention to your industry is how your blog can be more useful and better noticed. Take note of what is trending in the industry and what others are saying. That way, you can craft great blogs that will make your brand to stay relevant in your marketplace. If your blog speaks with authority as some kind of expert in your industry, it gets better attention. This you can do by using your blog to react to current events in your industry, provide solutions and recommendations, and contribute to trending discussions on important industry topics. By doing so, you’ll not only be creating more content, this content will help your website to rank higher in Google SERPs. That inadvertently helps to establish your brand as a voice of authority and expertise in your industry.

Create Amazing Headlines: Yes indeed! Amazing headlines easily grab readers’ attention many of who never really get to read the full blog anyway. Marketing experts reveal that many more people habitually read headlines than read the real content. That’s why they advise that bloggers should always make the headline the most crucial piece in their content.

Share Customer Stories: Yeah, every customer always has a unique story to tell. These stories can be a treasure trove of information for more blog posts. If these stories are success stories, so much the better! Through such stories, you can seize the opportunity to celebrate these customers. This in turn will help to highlight the contribution of your business to their success stories. As an added blogging advantage, customer stories usually take less time to write since you do not have to create content out of nowhere. It is as simple as calling up your customers and asking them to share their success stories. That helps you to create happier customers in addition to getting valuable information for your blog content.

How to Optimize your Blog Header

A blog header is one of the main design elements of blog content. It quickly reveals to readers the kind of content they can expect to find inside the blog. To serve that purpose effectively, it is advisable that you use different fonts and different colors to help make your blog header unique, appealing and attractive to readers. After designing your blog header that way, you should make sure that it is placed at the top of every page on your website. That is what makes it really effective. This is more so if the blog header contains special keywords that will help people find the blog and read the content.

Generally, there are many types of blog headers. The common headers are however the types that quickly tell readers what they are reading about and how important to them the content is. Optimizing your headers to address this issue at a glance is imperative for a good blog header. If a blog is not read, it does not serve any useful purpose for marketers.

For attractiveness, you can customize your blog header dimensions. That is fairly easy to do using the source URL for the blog article and creatively placing your choice photo on it for attractiveness. You may choose to download a photo from your computer and place it as the background for your blog header. The next thing is to open Photoshop and set up the picture to be loaded into Photoshop as a background, factoring in the customized dimensions you have decided on. A good blend of your chosen attractive fonts, keywords, photos, colors neatly placed on your blog header helps its attractiveness a great deal. This is how you can create a great blog header.

Make sure your blog header does not exceed 70 characters in length. This you can achieve by using only lower case and uppercase letters while carefully avoiding overcrowding the header with any type of formatting or images. If you do not take these precautions, you may end up jeopardizing the right first impressions your header is expected to give to your readers.

Note carefully that your blog header is not your only option for getting new readers. Pinging the blog is another option. You can use an online tool called ping blog to draw more people in and get them reading your blog. By using a ping blog, you can actually ping each of your blog pages to notify different people about your new blog. By telling more people what your blog is about and who it is meant for, you will attract more attention to the blog. That translates to traffic.

Smart marketers know that one of the most important goals of a blog header is to ensure the blog is search engine friendly. To guarantee this, you can set out your blog in the right information mood attractive to search engines and blog readers. By making your blog highly informative with a clear tone, it easily gets the attention of search engines and blog readers. Optimizing the header with the right keywords and fonts helps search engines to rank it well in their SERPs. That is great for inbound organic traffic to the blog.

Great Tip to Customize Your Blog Header

After deciding on all your measurements and text, you will need to place your chosen images into Photoshop. Next, select all of your images, and then go to Image > Adjustments > Size tab and enter the dimensions of your image. When the image is loaded, select your desired blog header dimensions. Then, click “Save” and you are done. This is one quick way to create a beautiful and attractive blog header.

Tips to Write Mobile-Friendly Blog Content

Mobile devices have no doubt revolutionized content marketing. A significant percentage of digital marketers now rely heavily on mobile devices to ply their trade since the world is now on the move 24/7. To reach the huge chunk of mobile devices users effectively, marketers must always find a reliable way to give out mobile-friendly content that is truly appealing to these readers. Here are a few things to thinker with in that quest.

Content Formats 

What is most important to digital marketers is to always find ways to increase the time users spend on their websites. The longer users spend on these sites, the higher the chances of getting them converted to customers. So what to do better to keep readers using mobile devices on websites longer? Just tinker with your content formats, that’s  what. There is evidence that most mobile readers prefer to read multiple content formats rather than just sticking to text. As a content writer, if you want users of mobile devices to spend more time on your website, it is best to stick to a content mix of videos, graphics, images or slideshows side by side with text content. 


 
Headlines and Paragraphs 

You can maintain the flow of your content by keeping your headlines and paragraphs short. Shorter headlines are viewed at a glance while lengthy ones most times are lost beneath the fold. The problem really lies with the size of screens of most mobile devices. The reason you must write to compress your thoughts more tightly while retaining the import of the message. The shorter the headlines and paragraphs on your blog content, the higher the chances of capturing much of the sentences on mobile devices at once.  That saves excessive scrolling around too.

Reading Patterns 

The rule is to write precisely what is easily readable on mobile devices. Reading on a mobile device is way different from reading the same content on other devices like laptops and desktops. On mobile devices, the biggest challenge is screen space which greatly limits vertical or horizontal sweeps on the devices. Many digital marketers now recognize that on mobile devices, most web readers usually view the upper right corner of a website more and that influences their reading patterns. For it to be effective, you can set out your content for mobile devices always with this reading pattern in mind.

Graphics/Images

Heavy and unwieldy images are definitely not mobile-friendly. It is best to use sizeable images and other content formats which are mobile-friendly reasonably. Overusing them is also not advisable. Images take up a sizeable portion of mobile devices’ screen space so, it is advisable to use fewer images. If there are images which do not support the point you are trying to make in your content, it is better you don’t use them at all. 

Pungent Content

To be a successful mobile content writer, you will need a complete overhaul of your own writing skills. Concise writing takes time and practice but it is very essential in case of mobile-friendly content. The point is to adopt writing skills which make your content highly compelling and your argument strong within the shortest possible space. The emphasis is to always tighten the content without necessarily shortening it so as not to lose the import of the message in the process.

Tips to Write a Great Blog Post

 Traffic and leads are the real essence of writing blog posts. Your blog could have everything it takes to make it important, but unless you’re significantly generating traffic and leads from it, you may be missing out on a lot of competitive advantage that other businesses are enjoying from blogging. Most marketers very well know that it is much easier to get leads when you blog than when you don’t. When you have a good blog in place, it becomes fairly easy for you to generate traffic and leads. What really matters then is how to write great blog posts capable of generating satisfactory results.

Here are some tips to get things done properly for good results.


 
Resolve to Write Great Content Always

This is a tested and proven marketing fact. When you have great content on your blog, the content becomes a resource for both your market and your industry. That’s the first step. You must write what people like to read which will benefit them in terms of information, education and even entertainment. When your content is good, it tends to go viral fairy quickly. That is when other sites will be able to link to your useful posts and attract potential leads towards you. Most marketers know this to be one hassle-free way of generating traffic and leads fairly easily.

The Opening of Your Blog Posts must Arouse Curiosity

This helps to pin down readers’ attention. Experts advise that a great way of beginning a blog is to lead with a fact, question or statistic catchy enough to hold attention. You can present the readers a problem and aim to answer it within the first few opening sentences as a way of giving your audience real value straightaway without any rigmarole. If your introduction manages to convince them enough, it could hold them to stay on and look better into your blog for the answers they are looking for. Your biggest challenge therefore is how to create a strong opening with which to win someone over in a very short amount of time to keep them reading on.

Post More Long Form Blogs

Expert bloggers have since discovered that long-form blog posting sometimes generate 10 times more leads than short-form posting. The reasons are not farfetched. Search Engines love long form blog posts more than short ones and they tend to rank them higher in their search results. Experts recommend a minimum of 350 words to as long as 1500 words or even more. These are more likely to cover more subject depths and answer most queries and concerns of readers. Long form blogs always manage to attract better traffic and even leads.

Post More Visual Content

Visual content like images, photos and videos are better at arresting readers’ attention than written content. Blog posts that contain a lot of visual content are a lot better for generating leads. Everybody likes looking at something interesting and attractive so visuals can provide more insight depth than text. More readers really gauge the meaning of any message through visuals than any other method because images really enhance posts. They help boost their appeal thereby making more people read the entire post. Images help to provide an emotional connection and a deep, personal connection with the reading audience.

Always Test Your Content Yourself

You can test your blog yourself by assuming you are a stranger reading what you have posted. You can do this by pretending that you are someone else visiting for the first time then ask yourself the following questions:

How relevant is the post to my needs?
Am I better informed about the subject matter?
Do I feel inspired enough to carry on reading?
Would I rely on this blog for information in future?
Have I seen a clear and better answer to my problem?
Does the blog make for easy reading?

If after this test your answer to all the above questions is in the affirmative, it is a good pointer that you have a good blog post out there which is capable of generating traffic and leads.

Direct Invitation to Act

A call-to-action feature is a must for any blog hoping to generate traffic and leads. It must be visible and strategically displayed on your blog in such a way that it can’t be missed or overlooked by visitors. In addition to your call-to-action, you can also embed links within your content to direct readers to relevant sign-up pages, e-books, gift tokens and even additional relevant pages and or more information.