To have and maintain a business blog can bring you many benefits. What is a blog article? To answer this simply, a blog article is a written piece under the category ‘blog’, which provides information to readers on designated topics.
Some people may perceive a blog as an informal diary-style entry which details what happens in someone’s life. Some of the popular blogs include blog articles about food and blog articles about lifestyle. However, blog articles have evolved in many more ways that we could ever imagine.
Having a blog on your business website is now a necessity more than a luxury. Blog articles can educate, inform and entertain. Whether you are in the fintech, healthcare, retail or services industry, creating blog articles will allow you to touch on a wide variety of topics directly or indirectly relating to what you can offer to your target customers.
Businesses that blog get more search traffic from Google and more visitors surfing in from other sites, which benefits sales, ad revenue, and brand loyalty. It’s not just the obsessive bloggers who reap the rewards, either. One Hubspot study found that just one to two blogs per month can boost B2B leads by 70%.
With high internet penetration and pervasive usage of smart phones, customers will manage more than 80% of their relationships online without talking to an actual person. Having a blog that’s accessible, trustworthy and highly ranked is crucial to gaining an edge across your business. What are the benefits of a well-maintained business blog?
Establish authority, do your SEO well
Having a business blog allows you to publish thought leadership pieces to build your authority in your area of expertise. For every blog article you publish, you should also ensure that you have implemented Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies so that your article can be ‘searchable’ in Google and if possible, ranked on the first two pages of the search results for your keywords.
If you do not have a dedicated in-house writer, it can be tedious and time-consuming to churn out more than 1000-word articles regularly, together with suitable visuals. Outsourcing your blog frees up your time to focus on other just as important parts of your business.
With the right copywriters, blog outsourcing will take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
Generate leads, have a call-to-action at the end of your article
With the right content, blog articles can be part of your marketing plan and can serve the purpose of a landing page. When you add a call-to-action button or box on your blog, users who landed on your article may turn out to be leads for your business.
This is especially so if you have established a certain level of authority in a particular topic and users view you as the subject-matter expert. Some would be more than happy to part with their email addresses or mobile number for you to get back to them.
Remember to add social media sharing links or buttons to every piece of content you create to allow users to share a blog article easily via their social media platforms like Linkedin and Facebook, This is critical in helping your article gain more impressions and in turn increase the chances of generating business leads.
Connect with your target audience, fill in your content gap
You may know your target customers, but how do I connect with them? How do I write a business blog? Writing a business blog is like writing a story that resonates with the readers. Before you start blogging, you should have done your competitors analysis using tools like Ahrefs, and found your content gap. You want to write stories to fill in that gap, engage your target audience and drive traffic to your website. Now you have the content gap, you are ready to write your blog.
While you may be good at what you do, writing articles may not be your forte. That’s perfectly fine because everyone is great at something for a good reason. You can always consider outsourcing your business blog to a wordsmith who knows his or her work. If your expertise is in sales or technology, focus on what you do best and delegate the rest to other professionals.
After a blog article is done, you may want to consider rewriting it for your Chinese audience. In this case, outsourcing your blog to bilingual copywriters who are able to write in both English and Chinese would be ideal.
Choosing to outsource does not mean you can’t have any in-house writers at all. In fact, it can be a mixture. There may be times where you would need a writer in another country to help you do an interview and an outdoor photo shoot to produce the blog article for you.
Lynnice is an experienced communications professional specialising in media relations and personal interviews. She loves to write in both English and Chinese. Follow her LinkedIn.