Bay Area Inbound Marketing Blog

Blog to Attract Customers by Bay Area Inbound

Posted by Laurie Monahan on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 @ 10:26 PM

Blogging and creating other content like ebooks and webinars are powerful ways to help more of your potential customers discover your business online.  Once you have developed a clear understanding of your business's keywords and optimized your website for search engines, your next step should be to attract more visitors through blogging.

Blogging Platforms to Consider

Blogging platforms like HubSpot, WordPress and Blogger have made publishing content on the web easier than ever. The goal of your business blog should be to publish articles that are not promotional but instead share your industry expertise.

Don't use industry jargon that only you and your employees would understand. Just as you did when brainstorming keywords, think of the words your customers would use to describe your business and use those keywords in your blog posts. 

Without a blog, a website is kind of like a brochure that doesn't change often. A blog makes your website more dynamic by automatically injecting new content every time a blog article is published.

Search engines reward higher rankings to websites that consistently add fresh content, and these higher rankings translate into new visitors and leads for your business.

If you are looking for a blogging platform for your business, some options include HubSpot, WordPress, TypePad, Drupal, Posterous. These platforms all offer a content management system (CMS) that allows you to easily add content to your blog, without needing to know any HTML code. This enables you to quickly update your site with industry news or other timely information, without having to wait for a webmaster to post your changes.

A well-constructed blog post should include several key components:

  • An Attention-Grabbing Article Title: Because your blog article’s title is the first thing people will see, it’s important to make sure it clearly indicates what the article is about, is concise, keyword-rich (because the header tag is the most important for SEO), and attention grabbing.
  • Well Written & Formatted Text: The body of your article should be well-written and formatted in a way that makes it easy to read. Consider using header tags and bulleted lists to break up the content into sections.
  • Images/Videos: Relevant multimedia content can make a blog article more memorable and fun to read. It also helps to break up text to make it more pleasing to the eye.
  • Links: Include in-text links to relevant content. These can also point to landing pages (which we’ll discuss more in Step Five) to help you generate more leads for your content.
  • Call-to-Action: Each and every blog article you publish should include a relevant call-to-action at the bottom of the article to help boost lead generation (again, will discuss this is more depth in Step Five of this ebook).

Deciding What to Blog About

A great way to start blogging is to think about the 10 most common questions you get asked by prospective new customers. Take each one of those questions and write a short article explaining an answer. Do this once a week for 10 weeks and you have the strong foundation for a successful blog.

Convert Blog Visitors Into Leads

In Step Five, you will learn how to create landing pages and calls-to-action (CTAs) to help drive more potential customers for your business. It is important to remember that your business blog is an important platform to use these conversion opportunities. Create a call-to-action of some type at the end of each blog post. These CTAs work best if the offer is closely related to the subject matter of the blog post. Additionally, you can place image-based CTAs in the sidebar of your blog as a secondary way to convert more visitors into leads. These calls-to-action should link directly to a landing page that provides downloadable access to a more in-depth learning experience such as an ebook or webinar upon the completion of a lead generation form. 

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Please explore our site www.bayareainbound.com for more information on how we can help your company Get Noticed, Get Talked About, Get Found, Get Leads, and Get Sales.

Topics: SEO, Bay Area Inbound, blogging, business blog, blog