IN THIS CHAPTER
Blogging for Business
Fostering a blog that can positively impact the bottom line Working with outside writers Writing headlines that engage your audience Auditing your blog in ten steps
The topic of blogging deserves in-depth discussion. Blogging is one of the most powerful and versatile digital marketing tools at your disposal. You can think of your blog as a home for content of every type, including text, graphics, audio, and video. Functionally, though, a blog is just a tool that helps you manage certain pages of your website.
The power of a well-executed business blog lies in its capability to generate awareness for your company, brands, customer-facing employees, products, and services. When done right, the business blog becomes a critical part of your marketing mix. If done improperly, however, a business blog can become a frustrating, time-consuming chore that gives you zero return for your effort.
Although you should always keep the customer journey in mind, the main purpose of your business blog is to create aware and engaged prospects who eventually convert into leads and sales. Although in other content areas, building ungated, gated, and deep discount offers( discussed in Chapter 3) into your content is critical, the goal of your blog is not the immediate conversion of a prospect into a lead or customer.
Marketing is about the sequence of the offers you make to prospects, leads, and customers. Your blog content is one of the entry point offers( EPOs) that you make to cold prospects who know nothing about you or your company. But content is also something you can distribute via email, social media, and paid traffic to even your best customers to keep your business at the forefront of people’ s minds and provide additional value.
In this chapter, we give you strategies for successful business blogging. We point you toward effective tools to use for blogging ideas, tell you how to find and work with content creators to keep your blog diverse and interesting, and help you brainstorm effective headlines for your blog articles. The final part of this chapter provides a list of the elements by which you can“ audit” your blog to make sure it’ s as effective as you can make it.