What is a blog? How to build a blog for the business website

Blogging has become one the most popular ways for businesses and individuals alike to interact with their customers, share ideas, and build credibility. As we take a tour across many business websites, most of them have a blog in their menu. In this article, we'll learn about the roles of blogging in marketing and steps to create a blog for your business website.

What is a blog in a business website?

A blog in a business website is an online journal that provides information about news, reports, and articles related to the company's products or services. It can also provide personal insights and views from employees of the company.

Why should a business have a blog in its website?

A business should have a blog because of following reasons:

It provide an additional communication channel between the business and customers.

A blog gives your site a human voice. It is an effective communication tool that enables your website to engage customers in a genuine way. According to MarketingProfs, an online marketing and public relations magazine, 87% of people want businesses to be more personal – they want to hear stories about how real people experience products and services. A blog is the perfect vehicle for doing just this.

Blogging helps bring more traffic to the business website.

Blogging is a form of search engine optimization (SEO). When you publish posts to your blog, the search engines index those posts and catalog those posts in their database so that they can be easily found when someone searches for specific keywords associated with what you write about. Therefore, your website can reach more audience and the business have a higher chance to sell its products or services.

Blogging is a way to generate leads and build relationships with customers.

Since blogging gives you an opportunity to talk about your business in a more personal way, it can help you develop a deeper relationship with existing customers. If the blog is well built, the business will gain more trusts from the customers.

Blogging helps maintain the freshness of your website.

Your blog is a place to share new events, projects, products, etc. with existing and prospective customers. In other words, it's the perfect way for you to keep your business at top-of-mind with current clients as well as attract new clients or customers who may have overlooked your company in the past.

Blogging helps improve your site's search engine ranking.

A blog can help you increase website traffic and your page rank on search engines. The more people visit your blog, the higher your chances are of becoming one of the top ranked websites for related keywords and/or phrases in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

How to build a blog for the business website

You can get started with your blog by following below steps:

Step 1. Make sure the business website has a blog module.

Most websites with a CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Magento, Shopify...) has supported a blog module where Admins can create many blog blog posts and blog categories. In case your website does not have a CMS (only HTML, CSS, JS... files) or the CMS does not support the blog module, please consider upgrading your website.

Step 2. Outline your blog categories.

Most blogs has categories where posts with the same topic can be grouped together. So, your blog need categories too.

By outlining the blog categories, you will define the topics that you will write about.

For example, if your company website provide logistics services, your blog categories may news, market trends, hot events, tips... that are related to logistics.

Step 3. Pick a topic and create the first blog post.

After completing step 2, you can create the first blog post on the website. Start with a topic that interests you, research it thoroughly to find facts and statistics, and use those facts to support the points you want to convey.

Use these tips when writing blog posts:

- Keep your blog posts concise.

- Make sure every sentence makes a contribution toward the main idea of your post, and that all paragraphs are organized around supporting or expanding on that main idea.

- Since you will be sharing these posts with an audience, make sure they are interesting to read by including stories, metaphors, or unique analogies.

- Don't be afraid to "think out of the box" and try to be different, but don't use clichés either.

- Include lots of keywords & phrases that are related to your business topic in your blog post, but make sure it still sounds natural.

Step 4. Link your blog on the menu of the business website.

Make sure the menu of the business website has a link to your blog category and blog posts. It helps if you put links to those items in your most popular menu sections, such as "Home", "About Us", "Contact Us" or any other pages that receive lots of views.

Step 5. Keep writing until there are at least 10 blog posts.

The blog with only 1 post cannot do much in Marketing. Therefore, you need to keep writing additional posts. Once you have created at least 10 blog posts and published them, take some time to go back and update older posts with new information.

Step 6. Promote the blog.

Promoting your blog means sharing it with other people who may be interested in knowing what's happening with your business or industry.

Promotion can take many forms, from simply telling a few friends about the new blog to setting up social media accounts solely for the purpose of promoting your content.

You can promote your blog effectively by using these channels: Facebook, Twitter, Email, Forum...

Step 7. Keep writing and updating your blog.

Please remember that there is no end in blogging. You need to keep writing and updating the blog regularly. The more you write, the more exposure you will get. The more exposure you receive, the more traffic you will see to your website.

Step 8. Use Google Analytics & Google Search Console to track visitors and keywords from search engines and social media websites.

You can find out what is working on your blog by checking web analytics and understanding the demographics of your readers' geographic location, age group, gender and social profile.

Conclusion

With the right strategy, blog posts can be a powerful way to reach new customers and keep existing ones engaged. The key is understanding how your customer’s brain works at different stages in the purchasing process or lead funnel. Once you know what cognitive neuroscience principles resonate with them and why they're important for conversion rates, it'll help you get started thinking about how you can leverage their power in your own digital marketing plan that drives sales by considering how your customers think.

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