Tips to Grow Your Online Business with a Blog

Most online business owners now rely on blogs to grow their businesses and blogs are really proving very useful in growing many of these businesses. Intermediate parties may not be able to promote your products as much as you would prefer, so blogs come in very handy to fill that gap. No matter how competitive the internet appears to be for business owners, a good blog can help make a real difference. Blogs can help to effectively popularize your products on the internet even in today’s highly competitive market. This is why business owners rely on blogs as superb resources for branding and for creating general awareness for their products on the internet. Blogs are a great resource for letting people online know how excellent the products you’re offering are that they would love to use. Below are some great tips on how to use your blog to grow your online business.

 
 
Post Only High Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. A good blog is all about crafting and posting quality blogs regularly to attract readers. Therefore, to attract more visitors to your blog, you need to post quality and compelling content regularly that people find interesting, engaging, and relevant to their needs. The reason they’ll keep coming back to your website for more blog information. If your blog content is well optimized with relevant keywords, it can help you with the digital marketing processes necessary to promote your blog and get it on top of Google SERPs. This is why the better the content you post, the higher your chances of attracting leads/buyers that could transmute to customers if well nurtured.

Build Email List

A credible email list is an excellent digital marketing asset for marketers. It however takes quality time and efforts to build one. Here is what expert marketers recommend to build a good email list. Make sure your blog has a contact form you use to capture the names, location, and email IDs of persons that comment on your blog through this contact form or comments section. To get your website visitors to part with such vital personal information about themselves, you must try to offer something of value to them in exchange for the information. You can for instance offer free newsletter, research information, eBooks, prize winning quizzes as well as promos. Offering such values is quite effective even though many visitors will freely part with their personal information if your content is attractive, has quality, useful, and relevant to their needs. Over time, the list will grow and become a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities. You can segment your email list for effective marketing and also use it to nurture leads to become customers.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

If you have accounts on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others, you can easily share information about your new blog posts to your followers. Your followers could in turn share this information to their own followers if they find the information useful. That way, your blog post can easily go viral thereby attracting many more people to share your posts if they find them interesting enough. On social media, you can seize the excellent opportunities the platforms provide to easily interact with potential buyers or others who may be interested in products. From these interactions, you can acquire some leads, prospective customers and even customers provided you are able to handle their queries and suggestions or comments correctly. If you do, your chances of converting some of them to buyers of your products are greatly enhanced.

Optimize for Digital Marketing

Every marketer wants his business to be visible online. Getting your business well ranked on search engines like Google is a great way to go about it. That calls for SEO, Search Engine Optimization techniques on your blog content and even your website. If you know how to, you can deftly use keywords relevant to your products on your content to make it visible to search engines. Because SEO is hugely technical, you may choose to hire the services of a good digital marketer to do various digital marketing processes on your blog. If well done, SEO can help your blog to rank in the topmost searches of Google SERPs. That is how your blog can get to attract more attention online and benefit from quality organic traffic.

Blog About Your Industry

Blogging about your industry or business niche is one great way to show expertise which in turn attracts readers. You can through your blog provide news, breakthroughs, research findings, trending issues and views about the latest happenings about your industry. That somehow helps to keep readers and other stakeholders in the industry interested in your blog. This is also one great way to increase your business blog following. Such readers will relate to you as a dependable authority in your industry and that could enhance their loyalty to your brand.
 
Provide Affiliate Links

Many buyers trust blogs more than online ads when buying products online that matters to them. Bloggers always latch on to that opportunity by providing affiliate links to the products they are selling in the content of their blogs. A click on these links takes buyers directly to where they can find the products. A great blog about your industry with the right affiliate links to your products is always a great idea. Providing affiliate links to your products is like an invitation to your website users to take a look and possibly buy from you. If links provide the real opportunities for you to make sales online, they help your business to grow.

Wrapping Up

A blog is a vital resource marketers rely on to make sales online and to grow their businesses. If your blog is of high quality, informative and educational enough, it serves this purpose very well. If you run a business online and you are not blogging for business yet, the time to start is now. The foregoing tips are very handy. When it comes to marketing online, you will never regret doing so with a good blog.

Social Media Marketing Tips for Newbies

If you are new in digital marketing and you haven’t joined social media yet, you are missing a lot. You are missing the power of social media platforms you can effectively leverage to market your business. Social media provides excellent opportunities for marketers to build a strong online presence, build a strong brand, nurture leads/customers, share quality content, do promos as well as effectively engaging and retaining customers. What else do marketers really need online they cannot get on social media? If you are new in social media marketing, here are tested ways you can start out and get real benefits from marketing on social media particularly when you open accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

 
 
Always Create Unique and Compelling Content

Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.

Make Yourself Valuable

Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.

Network with Your Connections

Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.

Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers

Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.

Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform

This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.