Sure, you already know by now that starting a blog is a great way to promote your business. It helps to position you as an authority in your niche and makes you come first to your potential clients’ minds whenever they think about your services.
The advantages of running a business blog are truly numerous but that’s not the focus of this post.
It’s one thing to own a blog; it’s another thing to consciously use it to grow your business. There are countless strategies you can use in growing your business with a blog, and they can be found easily around the web.
We have general strategies like: write awesome content regularly and share on social media, and also: add social sharing buttons to your posts and reply to comments.
These strategies (and more) work perfectly, and they’re highly recommended. However, for you to beat the competition, you can’t afford to keep doing the same things they do; you have to go extra mile and find creative ways to win.
Find below 3 not-so-common ways you can grow your business with your business blog:
1.Content promotion
Gone are the days when you just publish a post, do some on-page SEO, and share on social media. That’s what everyone else is doing. Remember, we’re trying to be different here. Why don’t you just get more eyeballs on your content by promoting it with an ad!
For example, simply ‘boosting’ on Facebook with few tens of dollars will get you thousands of potential readers faster than SEO or any other strategy can get you. But…in order not to waste money on vanity metrics (likes and comments) and actually increase your bottom line, make sure you have a funnel…
2.Top of Funnel
Don’t just let your readers go away after consuming your (hopefully valuable) content. Find creative ways to draw them in and become a customer, or at least a lead or fan.
Use your blog post as an entry into your sales funnel, so that readers can gradually move from mere visitors to repeat buyers. You can achieve this by putting a cookie on your site and then retarget readers with relevant adverts (ideally your lead magnet).
You can also achieve this by putting an opt-in box beneath your post, and on your side bar, so that people can give you their emails to claim your free content (lead magnet).
Another simple way to use your blog posts to move people further into your funnel is to ask readers to get more information about your business while on the page.
3.Content Freshness
Have you ever heard of Google’s Query Deserves Freshness (QDF)? This is the algorithm Google uses to ensure that for every query, a search result list should include one (or more) piece of content that’s been recently published.
In other words, though for a relatively short term, Google allows a freshly published content to outrank others of the same topic, especially when the fresh content has high Domain Authority (how high the host site naturally ranks).
For example, if a site like Wikipedia produces fresh content on a new topic, they’ll most probably outrank other sites for the topic because they already have high domain authority.
Can this work for a business blog that isn’t as authoritative as Wikipedia?
The answer is Yes! All you have to do is find an old post of yours that is already doing well in the search engines, and then update it. Edit it; add fresh facts, add more content, improve on its SEO, and then republish it.
Sit back and watch it soar higher in the coming weeks!
Agreed, some of these “uncommon ways” might not be entirely new to you, but you’d agree with me that adding these 3 to your content marketing/business blogging strategy will ultimately give you some edge over the competition.
So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and try them out, then come back to share your results with this community.