7 Tips to Build a Better Blog

If you’re anything like most people, if you’ve taken the time create a blog or website for your business, then what you’d really love is to see it get some actual user engagement that helps you establish your brand online and, ultimately, increase your customer base.  In no particular order, here are a few tips that can help you turn a stale or neglected blog into something people enjoy viewing.

Incorporate Video

This lets people get to know you, builds trust, and gives you the opportunity to establish your expertise and credibility before you ever even get to the point of discussing a potential sale.  Your own videos are always best, but provided it’s allowed by the terms of service of your different platforms, sometimes referencing highly-established industry videos on the subject can still be a good idea because it makes your posts more interesting.  Plus, the presence of video has been directly correlated with better chances of a higher website rankings.

Be Helpful

Give people information that’s actually helpful, and more than just a sales message.  This doesn’t mean that you have to solve all of their problems, but it’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise.  Additionally, the act of giving people something of value for free has been shown to create reciprocal goodwill. 

Clean Appearance

Don’t clutter your website with different places to click all over the screen, glaring colors, or lots of flashy graphics.  Make it incredibly easy for someone to land on your website and immediately find what they’re looking for without having to look all over the screen just to figure out where to even click.  Your landing page should have a primary purpose, whether it’s to get them to sign up for an email list or to actually pick up the phone and call you.  All of your page elements should drive the user toward that one action.  If it’s to call you, then you don’t want a bunch of other links saying things like Click Here, or Sign Up.  That creates mental confusion over what you actually want them to do, and a confused mind never buys.  This brings me to the next point.

Know Your Purpose

If you create a website that’s more of an information resource, you have to be extremely careful in its design if you hope for it to generate any sales, because a website optimized for sales and a website optimized to distribute information are two very different things.  When you try to mix the two, that’s when you’ll see your conversion rate plummet and wonder why you aren’t getting many customers.  Many people fall into the trap of trying to build a hybrid website simply because they see so many other people doing it.  If the purpose of your website is to generate leads for your business, then everything about your site should be designed with that principle in mind.

Write for the Reader

Forget about old SEO stuff that you may have heard about like keyword stuffing, and do your best to take any latest “tricks” with a big grain of salt.  Modern search engines are extremely smart about determining whether you’re actually writing information intended for people, or whether you’re trying to game the system.  Now, that doesn’t mean that you ignore SEO – it’s quite important.  My point here is that a lot of people are following old, bad practices that are going to get you into trouble, so unless you truly understand how to optimize your website then you need to keep things simple and write with a human reader in mind.  Ask yourself the basic question of what would an actual human visitor to your website both want and expect to see, and provide that.

Get Social

Customers are everywhere.  Make efforts to grow your brand on social networks where you can engage with current and potential customers.  Don’t have the time?  This is easily outsourced to a company that can manage it for you.  Getting SERP love from Google is not simply a popularity contest, but social signals are considered a powerful factor with search engines in determining whether your business is worthy of attention.  Imagine for a moment that you’re Google.  You have two companies that both have nice websites, but one of them has people talking about them in social media, and one doesn’t.  Which one would you rank higher?

Be Consistent

Unless you’re going to hire someone to do it for you, develop a routine that gives you time to write on a regular basis.  Often, the easiest inspiration for things to write about will come to you from things you’ve done over the last few days.  Think about recent jobs you’ve worked on, and something you encountered that many people might not know about it.  Then take that experience and use it as the basis to create a short write-up on either how to do it yourself, potential hazards if not addressed, how others in the industry see the issue (and why), or perhaps simply explain how life will be better once the issue is addressed.  Any time that you can translate the resolution of a problem into a time or dollar savings, this starts getting a potential customer thinking about how you could potentially provide value to them, without you having even tried to sell them anything.

Conclusion

There you have it – 7 tips to help you build a better blog that will help you grow your online brand and create trust with potential customers before you ever even get to the point of discussing a sale.  Thanks for reading!