Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

A business blog is one of the greatest tools for reaching potential customers but only when it captures the reader's attention and engages its audience. The best way to achieve this is by adhering to the golden rule that less is more. If you have not reached success with your business blog so far, it may not be due to content at all but could all be down to post length.

A blog post that is too long quickly loses readers who do not have the time to sit down and enjoy a long essay or who are just not interested enough to read long posts all the way through to the end. Recently, a clear trend can be seen favoring short blog posts, the majority featuring content that can be read in under a minute.

Your business blog is competing against millions of other blogs on the Internet, some of which may have very similar content. When presented with such a huge choice, users will only read what interests them most. Many readers only skim blog posts, picking out stimulating sentences and useful information. For these readers in particular, long blog posts often bring on the feeling of fatigue from the very beginning. 

While the exact length of a blog post can depend on your personal choice, short posts of around 250 to 500 words are typically recommended. This allows you space to introduce the main idea, summarize your key points and form a conclusion. After establishing a suitable length with several posts, it is a good idea to remain consistent in the future. This is also the optimal length for content sent as RSS feed as it can be viewed more easily.

Business blog writing should provide readers with a sample of an idea rather than an in depth explanation. Each of your posts should center around this subject; if you begin to include multiple topics in one post, you will quickly lose clarity. Making a clear plan of what you hope to begin before you start writing can help with this goal as can bullet points, numbered lists and subtitles. Writing short entries ensures you keep your content concise and avoid filling out with rambling, unnecessary details.

It is impossible to target the entire population through your business blog posts. When writing content, it is essential to picture your target audience and write with them in mind. If the topic requires some additional knowledge that may be unknown to some of your audience, imbed links within the text to outside sources or previous blog posts that provide further information. This way, your readers can choose to click on these links if they are interested while the chance of your audience becoming bored of reading a long post is diminished.

Your readers are far more likely to return to your business blogs if they found the content interesting and easy to read. The chance of your readers sharing pages on social media, subscribing to your blog and recommending content to friends and colleagues is equally increased. Best of all, short blog posts have the huge advantage for you, the writer, in that you are able to spend less time working in order to achieve greater success.

The optimal length of blog posts is highly debated. How long do you believe business blog posts should be?

To blog or not to blog. Unsure of what business blogging can do for your business? Have you ever wondered why even big businesses maintain their own blog sites. As major players with unlimited resources, why don’t Coca-Cola or P&G, for example, just bombard the airwaves and print media with advertisements, sit back and wait for the profits?

Big or small, businesses need blogging in order to thrive in an online landscape. A blog is an informal and interactive platform that the average reader can relate to. It is a good source of relevant information and not just mere promotion. Can your business really benefit from it?

A good way to position yourself as a thought leader

It’s nice to have good leaders but thought leaders are looked up to by their peers because of the innovative and insightful ideas they bring with them. They are often associated with terms like first, best, most, top and other superlatives you can think of. Well-thought out blogs can make well-thought-of leaders who inspire, not demand, a following. When you know what you’re blogging about, you build credibility and reputation for your organization, making it a trusted resource in your niche.

A good feed for the human mind

What has this got to do with your business? The human mind works with ideas and is constantly searching for new ones. Customers are humans with minds continually looking for good products. If you provide informative blogs that help customers make informed decisions on the products they buy, you stand to win their trust and grow your clientele.

A good bait for search engines.

SEO is the lifeblood of online businesses. Business blogging is one of the most effective baits for search engines because blogs are interactive and constantly updated. Be careful though with the quality of your content. New search engine algorithms are now equipped to detect what’s good or bad bait for them. Bringing your blogs to the social web where there is an overwhelming crowd could give you an added bonus. Stellar content is shareable content that can easily go viral, providing a feast for search engines. This then drives traffic to your site, generating leads, conversions and improved ROI for your business.

A good repository of resources

Good blogs contain useful information for readers and good bloggers know how to provide them. Comprehensive company knowledge, industry expertise, subject matter understanding and familiarity and, of course, a great writing ability are what draw wows from audiences. Your information nest egg must be consistently updated in keeping with the changing needs of searchers. Discontinuity and long intervals are potential recipes of disaster that can ruin your reputation, something that is not easy to rebuild. Once you’re an established trusted resource, make sure to maintain a good supply of blogs because people will keep coming back for more.

A good crowd drawer

A crowd is what you need to grow your business. Business blogging helps you fulfill this need. People are by nature social and they often want to be in a crowd where they can connect, interact and build meaningful relationships. Blogs with shareable content can spread like wildfire. Talk about controversial industry issues, for instance, and your’re sure to precipitate a deluge of opinions, ideas and discussions. This means traffic and more traffic to your site.

Now you’d complain that your small or mid-sized business would be a dwarf to the giant Coca-cola or P&G. According to Wikipedia, even Coca-Cola started small in the 1800’s with Asa G. Candler, a Coca-cola cofounder, acquiring full ownership of the business for $2,300. Look at where it is now. There was no business blogging to speak of in those days but this just shows that one small step after another can bring a business to the big leap. Business blog writing could be that small step to that big leap.

Not convinced yet? Tell us why.

Small business blog marketing isn't easy, but it's one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways of growing your online business. It requires persistence and hard work, but fundamentally, anyone can do it if they put their mind to it.

Here are three strategies we constantly see utilized for great effect. These are the things that successful blogs do, and you should too!

1 - Blog Consistently!

If there is any reasonable way of defining small business blog marketing strategies that work, it has to be based around customer acquisition. Fundamentally, you only get a return on your investment if someone buys something.

On the matter of converting visitors into viable customers, Blogspot's 2012 "State of Inbound Marketing" report makes one key element quite clear: The more you blog, the more likely you are to gain customers.

Among companies with blogs, only 43% those who posted less than monthly reported gaining a customer through their blog. Among those who post multiple times a day, that number rises to 92%. And it's a pretty smooth progression the whole way. The more often and consistently you blog, the more likely your blog is to attract actual paying customers.

Maintaining this level of output can be tricky, especially for small operations. That's one of the biggest reasons we recommend those who are serious about content marketing investigate article writing services as a way to obtain quality content in the quantities needed to make your small business blog marketing strategies pay off.

2 - Pursue Social Media

As we've mentioned before, we strongly feel that your online marketing strategies are best served by pairing blogging and social media strategies, using one to reinforce the other. There's no reason for it to be an either-or game when they both have so much to offer.

You should ensure that you have social media sharing buttons available for every blog you post, to encourage people to share them. A popular link shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Linked-In can result in a huge influx of hits. Likewise, while you probably should not use your social media accounts to announce every single blog you post, use it to promote major articles that you think have the potential to "go viral" or might genuinely provoke debate.

Social media can also be used indirectly to aid your small business blog marketing. The wealth of user information they have is generally put directly into your hands, and you can use it to leverage your market research. Check out Facebook Insights, PeopleBrowser for Twitter as well as their new targeted advertisements, along with other social-tracking systems like Klout to learn as much as you can about your audience.

3 - Become an Authority

Easier said than done, right? Well, while truly becoming a respected expert authority is quite hard, it's still quite possible to create the appearance that you are one, and that's one of the main ways to go about actually becoming one.

The key is to structure your blog and website to encourage people to continue reading your content once you're there. The more you can create an air of authority, the better that will go, and the more likely they are to either share your content, decide to make a purchase, or (hopefully) both!

Here are a few general tips:

• Blog on a wide variety of topics relating to your own industry. The more ground you can cover with good articles, the better it looks.

• Use plenty of internal links. When you mention a topic you've talked about previously, link back to the past article.

• Utilize intelligent tags with a sidebar map allowing users to easy access information on specific topics.

• When adding external links, link to the highest-quality sites you can find.

• This last one's a toughie: be willing to admit when you're wrong and post updated blogs when needed.

What other effective small business blog marketing strategies have you discovered?  

We talk a lot about business blogs and business blog writing here because we still believe it is one of the single best ways to advertise yourself online. It's cheap, it's relatively easy, and the longer you keep at it, the more leads you'll end up gaining. Best of all, a business blog is something that any company of any size can have as long as it has a website.

It might take a little time to build a following, but really, creating a productive business blog boils down to five fairly easy steps.

Building a Great Business Blog In Five Steps:

1. Decide on Your Voice and Style

Before you sit down and start typing, you need to make a few choices. You need to decide what your blogging voice will be. The personality you show on your blog will go a long ways towards defining how your visitors perceive you, so you need to decide what sort of image you want to project and how it ties into your branding and positioning.

In general, unless you're targeting a very selective audience, blogs should be readable by laymen. Don't go nuts with technical terms and jargon unless you only want industry insiders reading. However, you'll need to decide how formal you want to be, whether you'll write in first, second, or third person, and matters like that. This is also the time to determine what SEO keywords you'll be using.

Unless you're setting up your blog to have multiple contributors within the company you'll want to have one consistent voice and personality for your blogs.

2. Start Blogging

The journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, and all that. Once you've decided how you want to write your business blog, it's time to start looking at what you're going to write about. Writing consistently is important. Hubspot has identified a clear trend in blogging: the more you blog, the more leads you get.

If you're stuck for ideas, here are a few general templates:

• Write a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for your business or industry.

• Pick a large problem in your industry and propose a solution.

• Write a how-to guide for a common process for your product.

• Curate other blogs in your industry with commentary.

• Make predictions about new trends a year or five down the line.

3. Utilize Social Media

Business blogging goes hand-in-hand with social media. Register accounts with at least a couple of the major social media services - we recommend Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In as the best starting points. (Facebook is better for B2C connections and Linked-In is better for B2B, if you're looking to prioritize.)

Put social sharing links on all your blogs, to encourage people to share them. You should also sometimes -not always- post links to new blogs on social media, as well as simply joining into conversations to help establish yourself as a credible source.

4. Track Your Results

To get the most from your business's blog, you need to track how well it's doing. Use your server statistics to keep an eye on how many visitors you're getting, what keywords are getting them there, and how many are going on to click on your Calls-To-Action or purchasing something. This is how you see what works and what doesn't so that you can refine your strategies.

If possible, Hubspot has probably the best overall set of tools for tracking these analytics. If you can't afford them, Google Analytics are an excellent free alternative.

5. Keep Blogging!

Your new business blog won't be an overnight success. Expect to spend at least six months, or possibly a year, before it starts seeing real returns. It's a matter of slow growth, but if you keep at it, you will start seeing your rewards.

In the meantime, if you have any corporate blogging strategies of your own, share them in the comments! 

Paying for web content is an expense that you can easily avoid. After all, why would your company need professionally written content? Articles and blog posts are meant for news organizations – not for companies like yours. Why pay an additional fee to some content writing service when you can ask one of your employees to quickly type up a list of your services? You don’t need some fancy marketing firm to come in and start telling you what to do. After all, you’ve been running your company successfully for years without professional web content. All you really need is a little intro paragraph and a few flowery little tag lines. Anyone can do that, right?

The answer is a resounding “No way!” Contrary to popular belief, web content is much more than a few paragraphs of words used to fill up a page. There are all sorts of additional benefits you can gain by paying for professional, top quality website content instead of letting an inexperienced staff member jot down a couple sentences of text. When it comes to websites, content is just as important as the layout and design. Good content, like great design, will captivate your audience. On the other hand, poor content writing, like poor design, will limit your ability to effectively reach your potential customers.

Here are the top three reasons why you need quality content for your website:

Credibility. When a potential customer searches for a particular product or service online, they’re probably going to browse through at least two or three different websites before they make a decision. Your web content is your opportunity to show users why you’re their best bet. In other words, this copy needs to be well-crafted, intelligently composed and touch on all of the most important aspects of your business. Web content that is poorly written and contains numerous spelling and grammar errors will immediately cause your customers to doubt your abilities. After all, why should they trust the quality of your products or services when you can’t even manage to write a cohesive paragraph?

Lead Generation. Thanks to the fast-paced online world, you have less than five seconds to capture the attention of users, and another five seconds to convert them into customers. That’s exactly why your content needs to be entertaining, well-written and full of colorful language. It also needs to utilize search engine optimization (SEO) tactics so you can increase your page rank and show up consistently in web searches. Professional web content can help you achieve these objectives and increase the amount of leads you generate from your website.

Money Savings. At first, it may seem odd to think that your websites content can somehow save you money. After all, don’t you have to pay for quality copy? The fact of the matter is that well written web content can achieve many of the same goals as many of your advertising efforts – and has the potential to land you even more new business than a radio spot or a print media ad for a much smaller price tag.

Overall, when it comes to websites, content has the power to make or break each individual sale. Instead of filling your website with a bunch of unoriginal, unprofessional junk, hire a professional who can help you establish your credibility and increase your leads. It may be an additional investment but, as every successful business owner knows, top quality product doesn’t come for free.

Now, please share with us, have you ever paid for professional web content? Did you see results?

As we recover from the fist-clenching, jaw-dropping, work-distracting weeks that were the 2012 Summer Olympics, we begin to remember why the event only happens once every four years – it’s exhausting. As the athletes jump and run, flip, splash and hurl their way through their respective finish lines, we sit on our couches and wonder – how can anyone possibly build up that much physical endurance? The Olympians train for years in order to groom themselves for the big games, but it takes a certain amount of skill and spirit to become a medal winner.

In many ways, inbound marketing is really no different than the Olympics. Thousands of companies compete for the same customers – but only a few businesses have the knowledge and know-how to rise to the top of their field. Like the USA’s Olympic team, the most successful companies have their own special tools that help them build their brand and convert more traffic into paying customers than ever before. We like to call them the inbound marketing medal winners.

The Gold – Firstly, and most importantly, there is content. It’s important to know that content is a true success story. It can be bad – in fact, it can be downright embarrassing. However, with a little time and a lot of training, content can quickly become your star player. Content writing, at it’s gold-winning best, is relevant, well-researched, high quality and, most important of all, it’s exactly what your audience wants to see. Your web copy – from your home page to your blog posts – needs to be entertaining enough to grasp the attention of your audience and thorough enough to address their primary concerns while building brand credibility.

The Silver – Next, there are social shares. In addition to winning you big points for quality, social sharing is the player everyone knows and loves. They’re the viral videos, the colorful infographics and the witty Tweets. Social shares are the pieces of content that are so overwhelmingly interesting and entertaining that social media and social bookmarking site users feel the need to share it with all of their followers, who, in turn, will share it with their followers. If you’re looking to grow your audience and reach more potential customers than ever before, social sharing is your best bet. Not to mention, search engines generally rank websites higher when their website content is shared often.

The Bronze – Last, there is Search Engine Optimization. SEO gets a bad rap sometimes – but that’s just because not everyone knows how to use it effectively. This is the player on your team that you must watch carefully, and constantly update with all of the newest strategies. SEO can change pretty fast, and the last thing you want to do is attempt outdated or illegitimate tactics that could get you disqualified from the whole game. You see, Google isn’t fond of black hat SEO tricks and your company would be wise to avoid them at all costs. Instead of stuffing your content full of keywords or embedding your copy full of unnecessary links, stick to quality content and genuine, proven strategies.

When it comes to the inbound marketing race, it’s important you have all three medal winners tactfully in place. By creating interesting content that people will want to share, and using legitimate tactics to drive traffic to your site to discover this content, you will have a much better chance of beating your competitors and winning over new customers.