One of the top reasons that startups fail is poor marketing. If you’re looking for effective marketing ideas to pursue, consider joining the 55 percent of marketers whose top marketing priority is content creation. Your content can become your startup’s biggest ally, as companies that blog receive 55 percent more traffic than the ones that don’t.
Whether you are currently blogging or are unsure of where to start, you may have some questions: Will people even read my blog? How can I compete with the billions of blogs on the web?
4 tips to turn your blog into a marketing machine
Blogging not only helps you connect with current customers, but it’s also a great source for finding new ones. According to Hubspot, businesses that blog produce 67 percent more leads per month than those companies without blogs.
Use these four tips to help you develop a successful blog for your startup:
Blog regularly
The effort you put into blogging determines what you get out of it, so writing and publishing content consistently is important. But, what does “regularly” mean? How often should you blog?
One study found that businesses publishing 16 or more blog posts per month (four per week, if you are consistent) saw 3.5 times more traffic than companies publishing four or less posts per month. To help you come up with content topics, try analyzing customer questions, monitoring what’s trending in your industry and conducting keyword research.
Related: How to Develop a Content Strategy and Grow Your Blog to 2 Million Readers
Optimize your content
How can you turn your blog into a powerhouse that draws in hundreds of thousands of readers per month? Optimize your content. This includes keyword and length optimization, and the use of visuals.
If you want people to read your blog, they have to be able to find your content in the first place. Conduct keyword research before writing an article to ensure your target audience is searching for the topic in the first place. Utilize focus keywords throughout your article to get your blog to rank (hopefully on page one) on search engine results pages.
The length of your content can also influence how effective your blog is. While the average blog post is 1,151 words, 50 percent of bloggers report that articles with 2,000 words or more have the strongest results. To engage your readers, include visuals or videos that emphasize key points, like statistics, definitions or lists. Top content marketing influencer, Jeff Bullas, found that articles with images receive 94 percent more views than articles with just text.
Keep in mind that a blog reader may not immediately turn into a paying customer. However, optimizing your articles will help you get on a potential customer’s radar. As a new business owner, this can help lead to a sale down the line when your customer is ready to make a purchase and you are top of mind.
Collaborate with other websites
Another way to build up and legitimize your blog is to collaborate with other websites by providing guest posts and contributed content. Contributing guest articles allows you to get yourself front of a larger audience, and helps to further establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
In order to build collaborative relationships like these, consider reaching out to fellow experts in your industry to build your contact list and to gather influencer quotes for your own content. Also, publishing a weekly, monthly or quarterly content roundup lets you feature helpful articles from around the web. Not only does this give more value to your readers, but it could also help you establish important contacts.
Sign Up: Receive the StartupNation newsletter!
Promote content
Last but not least, be sure to promote your articles. Although keyword optimization will help people surfing the web find your articles, you should also promote them via social media and email marketing.
According to one source, 60 percent of marketers use blog content in their social media posts. By promoting articles you’ve written on social media, you can use engagement results to determine which of your content topics perform best with your social audiences.
Allowing blog readers to subscribe to your blog gives them updates when you publish new articles. Once readers subscribe, you can send out a weekly, monthly, or quarterly email that lets them know about new content you published.
As you can see, using the above tactics can help make your blog’s content into your startup’s biggest ally. In what ways do you use your content to promote your startup? Please share with us in the comments section below!
