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When it comes to online marketing for your B2B business, a blog should be one of the key pillars of your marketing strategy. It’s the vehicle for all of your content, and as you may have heard by now, content is king.
The content you create not only helps to establish you as an authority within your industry, it can help to create trust and loyalty amongst your readers. Not to mention that if you know what you are doing, your content can help to increase the amount of traffic to your website. And the more web traffic you have, the more potential decision makers you have access to.
If you've dabbled your toes in the blogging waters already, but aren't getting the results you were hoping for, here are 5 blogging tips you should use that will help you boost your website traffic.
1. Use keywords
Optimise the content on your blog using keywords. Keywords help to improve your web ranking on search engines such as Google, which in turn provides more exposure to your website and more web traffic. You’ll want to avoid using keywords that are too broad as well as keywords that are too specific.
Use long tail keywords in order to improve the quality of the visitors to your blog. Doing this will help improve the chances of conversion. One thing to be careful with when using keywords is not to over use them and to make sure they are relevant.
*Top Tip* Keywords should always be focused around your buyer persona's needs and challenges. In a nutshell, you need a clear idea of what your target audience will be searching for and why. Take a look at our blog post
2. Write varied and visual content
Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Don’t limit your blog to just written content. Even if your content is well written and informative (as it should be), a lack of variety can hurt.
Consider creating more visual content, such as videos, infographics, images and more: Users tend to prefer visual content, in fact visual content is 80% more likely to be read. Here's the science behind it.
Visual content is also more shareable. Users are nearly twice as likely to share visual content across their social media networks as well, thereby increasing the exposure of the content and helping to attract more visitors to your website.
*Top Tip* Search engines will reward variety as well – so be sure to use keywords in the headlines, descriptions and tags for all your visual content.
3. Share your content
You should make sure you post links to new content on all of your social media platforms. This will draw more traffic from your followers. Not to mention that followers can like or share the content, which will expose it to their personal social circles. It might not seem that important, but don't underestimate the power of social proof such as number of shares - it helps build your credibility online.
*Top Tip* To increase the odds of your content being shared, make sure that you add social buttons to your blog. This allows regular readers to share your content with their social circles with just a click of a button.
4. Write guest blogs
By writing for other blogs, you’ll help attract a completely new audience. Most other blogs will link back to your website in return for writing a guest blog, which will help to bring those new readers back with you.
However, make sure you're choosing relevant sites to partner with. If you're blogging already, you'll probably have noticed a steady stream of random companies requesting to place a totally irrelevant guest article on your blog. Choose content partners who are a good fit in terms of target audience, but also have a good level of reach and influence, otherwise you're wasting your time and barking up the wrong tree.
*Top Tip* If you're unsure on which sites would be best to guest blog on, take a look at the content they're already posting, how regularly they post, how many social followers they have and how much their audience interact with their content socially. You can also look at measures such as Moz Rank to measure link authority and popularity.
5. Avoid common blogging mistakes
You don’t want your content to be too long. Online users aren’t looking to read a novel. In fact, large blocks of text are going to scare them away. Break up your text and use headers so that your content is easy to scan. You want readers to be able to get a gist of what the content is about and what it covers at a glance.
You should also focus on creating good content. Some companies will create massive amounts of content as vehicles for their keywords, but this results in the quality suffering, which will result in a loss of readers.
*Top Tip* Aim to help. It's no use writing reams of content that your audience aren't going to find useful or interesting, Relate all content back to your buyer persona and aim to write content which addresses their needs and challenges.
Need a bit more guidance?
If you're still finding your feet formulating your digital strategy and getting ROI from your content marketing, don't worry. We've put together an eBook to help you. Download it now below.