Source : How to increase traffic to your blog and generate more leads
Blogging is an indispensable part of any content marketing strategy. According to Demand Metric, companies with blogs get 67% more monthly leads than companies that don’t blog. Blogging increases website traffic, generates leads, and improves search rankings. A good quality blog can build your audience’s and target market’s trust in your brand.
To produce quality blogs and improve blogging strategies, there are 6 steps you need to focus on. These are planning, writing, SEO, designing, publishing, and promotion. Let’s learn about each of them in detail.
1. Planning
Planning your blog involves a lot of work. You need to define your audience, decide on your topics and keywords related to your business, and create a schedule regarding when you want to publish your blogs. You would have to describe your buyer persona and layout the objectives you want to achieve through the blogs. To make your blog engage, entertain, or educate your audience you need to use those keywords with which your audience can relate to. You can use Keyword Planner research keywords that are related to your audience and industry. By doing so, you can create blogs that address issues that are on your audience’s minds. You can also use a good content calendar to develop a workflow for planning and distributing content over time.
2. Writing
Writing means crafting a good blog that involves coming up with engaging headlines, using the right tone, and developing grammatically correct content. Always keep your writers aware of the plans and goals of your blog strategy. They should know what is your target audience and use the tone correctly. The tone used in the writings reflects your brand’s identity. You can use apps such as Hemingway and Grammarly to check the readability of your blog posts and produce good quality and grammatically correct content.
3. Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
We discussed searching and planning keywords in the Planning process. To make your content SEO friendly, you need tools like Google Search Console and Check My Links to secure you’re using your keywords and other SEO standards suitably. You can optimize the visibility of your blog posts on search engine results pages with Google Search Console. You can monitor the click-through-rates, backlinks, and search queries and tip areas that require modifications. Make sure your content has appropriate and quality backlinks and keywords. This can improve its rank on search engine results pages. You also need to establish your blog posts and webpages as a source of credible information though external and internal links, in order to get backlinks. Also, do use the free Google Chrome extension, Check My Links, to double-check the links you share in your blog posts, and make sure they aren’t broken.
4. Designing
Always design your blog posts with images and infographics. We inhabit an era of pictorial culture and therefore articles with images get 94% more total views. Images and graphics make blogs more engaging and improve the website’s visibility on the search engine results page. You can easily find a copyright-free image on Unsplash or Getty Images. You can also use Canva to create creative infographics from well-designed templates to support your content. Using these design tools, you can improve the online growth and engagement of the blog.
5. Publishing
Most businesses publish their blog on their websites that use content management systems (CMS) like WordPress, Squarespace, Magnolia, Weebly, Wix, Bynder, etc. These are really good CMS and are easy-to-use. It has customizable templates and functions great. Also, you can repurpose your blog content by sharing short or long parts of it on platforms like Medium and Linkedin. Just provide the link to the original post on your website. This way, you can easily create a backlink to your website.
6. Promoting
We earlier discussed SEO that can bring traffic to your website. However, you should not rely just on this and promote your blogs to reach the maximum audience. You can use blog promotion tools like Hubspot, BuzzSumo, Flipboard, etc to disperse your blog posts on various platforms. To decide about blog promotion, recall the plans you made in the first step of your blog. After setting your content marketing plan, use tools that will endorse your posts to web pages and platforms your target audience visits.
LAURA BARTON is a creative person who has been writing blogs and articles about security. He writes about the latest updates regarding office.com/setup and how it can improve the work experience of users. His articles have been published in many popular e-magazines, blogs and websites.
