How to Create a Blog that Will Market Your Business and Increase Sales

When you create a blog there are guidelines and some best practices to follow. This article will give you tips and best practices for blog objectives, using a blog for lead generation, marketing and sales.

According to Hubspot in the Science of Blogging, most people read blogs once a day or even more than once per day. People read as many as 10 or more blogs, especially if they use an RSS feeder like Google to aggregate blog feeds.

More than 40% of business blogs post weekly and about 30% post 2-3 times per week. It has been found that the above frequency of blog posts drive results like customer acquisition where 60%-70% of business have acquired customers from their blog.

Companies who blog can expect to attract at least 55% more visitors than those who don’t blog. Blogging also increases social media success.  Where social media platforms are your outposts, your blog is your home base where you bring customers back to in order to get to know you, your company and your products/services.

Why Blog for Business

First you need to be clear on why you want to create a blog for your business. What are the objectives for your blog? Here are three examples, but you could have more objectives:

• Establish thought leadership
• To generate traffic
• To attract sales leads.

Blogging is about Lead Generation

When you have lead generation as one of your blog objectives, there are some best practices to follow.

• Include calls to action
• Create great offers
• Optimize your landing pages

At the end of every blog post you should have a call to action. This can be as simple as asking visitors to leave a comment, to subscribe to your RSS feed or to download a Report with more information.

Tips for Call to Action

• Add one to the end of every blog post and match it to the content of the blog post
• Use action verbs
• Use graphics/images to make it stand out
• Adding a call to action on every blog post can triple the number of leads from your blog

Blog for Sales and Marketing

When attracting Sales leads is one of your objectives, you want to convert those leads to customers. Conversion is where we take what we have spent time and money to get visitors and change it into something valuable to sales (leads).

A best practice for converting leads is to make an attractive offer to the visitor (call to action) and then to refer to the content type. Here are a few examples:

• Click Here to Register for the Webinar on Blogging for Business,
• Download this Report for more information,
• Learn more about how to optimise your site to rank higher by Downloading our Search Engine Optimisation Kit.

When you make your offer free, the conversion rate is even higher. It is best not to ask to be contacted.

Tips for Offers

• Offer more than “Contact Us”, or “Demo” or “Consultation”.
• User free and contest offers
• Offer content that is available on demand like Reports, White Papers, Webinars, tools.
• Tell people exactly what they will get

Landing Page Optimisation

All websites need landing pages that are clear and simple, with limited navigation and preferably above the fold (no scrolling). You also need to track your conversion rate by looking at your Total Page Views, divided by Total Form Submissions, to give %Total Conversion Rate.

Be specific about what you’re asking people to do by using a positive action on the Button, for example DOWNLOAD, SUBMIT etc.

Tips for Landing Pages

• Make it easy to see the form and limit navigation options
• Focus the page on conversion with no secondary offers
• Shorter forms convert better
• Use a positive action on the button
• Testing is king

To turn your Blog into a marketing tool to to increase sales, download the Business Blogging Toolkit.