Top 5 Tips You Need to Consider When Starting a Business Blog

Blogging is the commonest form of content marketing among online marketers. You can blog about anything under the sun provided you have good information that others will like to know about. You can blog for business, for entertainment and even for fun. Anyone can start a blog if they so decide. Following are some valuable tips you should consider if you want to start your own blog and be successful at it.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Platform

Your host platform matters a great deal if you want to manage a profitable blog. You can choose to blog on an independent website and pay for hosting it or you choose popular free website hosts like Blogger, Wix or WordPress. If you are just launching a blog, you must make hosting your top concern because aside the hosting fees you’ll have to pay if you are not using a free blogging platform, the blogging tools each host website makes available for your blogging activities are of immense importance for the success of your blog. They provide web security as well. This is hugely important because using insecure web host can seriously harm your blog. It is best therefore to use a web host that places a high priority on security particularly with servers that have security precautions like firewalls and routine website backups.

2. Set up Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs act like the “eyes” of search engines. They basically tell search engine algorithms which of your content pieces are most important and exactly what your post is about. Since you are likely to be blogging on the same niche, chances that you’ll be writing comparable content is very high. Because such content will be aiming for the same tagline, it is best to have a canonical URL for each piece. Therefore, setting up various URL types from scratch can be very useful for your blog. If however you are using a free-blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress, their in-house blogging tools will take care of most of your blogging requirements.

3. Use Visuals with Great Care

The use of visuals in a blog can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous. If you’re new to blogging, you need to take adequate care when using visuals in your content. It is not advisable to use just any images you come across online. If you do, you run the risk of infringing on copyrighted images. What is best to do is to strive to find websites that offer free photos and visuals. There, you’ll have unfettered access to high-quality images that you can use for free. Shutterstock or Pixabay are great places you can get free high-quality images you can safely use on your blog content. However, if you have the expertise and the right equipment, it is safer still to create your own images.

 

4. Closely Monitor the Performance of your Website

No matter how good your blog content is, if your blog website is not performing to par, your blog is not likely to get any traction. This is why you must monitor the performance of your website routinely. By thoroughly understanding how and where people access and use your website, it is easier for you to figure out whatever needs to be done on the site to enhance its performance. You’ll also be able to know what elements you need to add to the website for it to perform better. Try to avoid any guess work when taking vital decisions on your website. By using some great analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can find out exactly which are your most popular content and where your website visitors are coming from and much more. This tool also helps you to monitor visitor activity across your website, track customers and leads. The data generated by this tool enables you to determine what works well on your website and what needs fixing. Overall, you can always be in a better position to improve the general performance of your website if you monitor its performance well enough and with the right tools.

5. Invest in a Good Plagiarism Checker Tool

Plagiarism checker is one fine tool no serious blogger can afford to do without. With it, you can easily ascertain the originality of your content before posting it. This is hugely important because you can get penalized by search engines for posting duplicate content. Your blog content must be unique and original if you want to achieve great results with your blog. Most versions of plagiarism checkers operate quickly. That is one great advantage bloggers have if they use these checkers to quickly search the entire internet before posting content. If the checker Okays your content, you don’t have to worry about whether you plagiarized it or not even if per chance. All you need do as a blogger is, when you finish crafting your content, just upload the work to the software, and it will immediately run a complete plagiarism check on the material. This way, instead of re-reading your work and manually checking for plagiarism, you can save your precious time and effort by using plagiarism checker tool like Copyscape to help you out in a matter of seconds.
 
Wrapping Up

If you are new to blogging, use the foregoing tips faithfully. As you blog along, you’ll be able learn some more tactics/techniques along the way. Even if the niche you are blogging on is a bit saturated, you can get along fine and hold your own if you allow these tips to guide you. Make sure you post great content regularly and consistently when you get off your launch pad. With patience and determination, you too can become a blogging success with time.

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.