So you want a business blog designed, installed and set up for you.
You’re probably a business start up, or it just dawned on you how you’re practically killing your business for still not having a business blog. You realize how you need to start promoting your business online, and how it’s absolutely crucial to your internet marketing efforts to have a business blog.
Before you go and hire someone, here’s a handy list of things that business blogs must have in order for you to turn it into a traffic-pulling, list-building, awesome marketing tool.
Here are the things your business blog must have or must be (ideally) in order to really help you get leads, make sales and bag new clients:
(As a kind of blanket disclosure, we’ll be putting a lot of links to services in here and you should assume that they’re affiliate links.)
1. Hosted in your own domain
Because you’re establishing a business blog, don’t set one up under a domain you do not own, like:
- www.easisell.blogspot.com
- www.easisell.typepad.com
This is a big mistake that a lot of home-based businesses do. A blog is a business asset that you’ll be building for the long term. If you put it on a domain you don’t own, and if that domain goes down, your blog will go down along with it. Do you really want to take that risk? You need to be in control of your business assets.
Plus, if it’s on a domain you don’t own, you will not be able to customise your blog. You will not be able to brand it and truly make it your own. It will look exactly like millions of other blogs out there.
If you still don’t have a domain for your business, we’ve found Namecheap to be the best value for money when it comes to buying domains.
However, if you’ve already bought a domain for your business, you don’t really need to buy another domain (unless you want to). You can easily set up a blog on a subdomain of your existing domain. But of course, if you want your blog to have a separate domain of its own for branding purposes, you can do that, too.
As for hosting your blog, your web developer should be able to provide this for you as well as setting up and configuring the blog for you.
2. Professionally Designed / Credible-Looking
Ideally, have a blog designed for your business from scratch. This makes your blog look unique, professional and therefore adds credibility. Take this route especially if you are targeting affluent markets, or if you are in a niche or industry where uniqueness, luxury and creativity are expected.
Do not make the mistake of getting a blog done for you and set up while only considering the set up costs. You really need to choose an appropriate blog suited to your business needs.
For example, if you’re a high-end Interior Designer, or a Photo Studio, or Real Estate agent, you will make more impact if you showcase your goods using images and videos heavily on your blog. So having specific functionalities like a gallery view or a lightbox will be beneficial.
Be prepared to accept that a fully customised blog with advanced features and functionalities could take weeks to create, though. And if you hire a reputable designer/developer, it could cost anywhere between $5000 to $20,000 (depending on the complexity of your requirements).
If that price is outside your budget range, don’t worry, you have some options. What you can get is a non- or semi-customised Premium WordPress Theme, and just focus on publishing great high-quality content and then just upgrade your blog later on when the money starts rolling in. For start ups this actually may be the better route.
If you’re going down this route, choose from high quality Premium Themes with a fully customised header as much as you can. Pick a theme that is uncluttered, with elements that make it very easy on the eye and easy to read. Pick a design so that your viewers can easily locate the information they could be looking for. You really want your visitors to get drawn to the content of your blog posts, so get rid of any element that could take away their attention from that (although it wouldn’t really hurt to display banners ads or text ads linked to your own offers on the sidebar).
The most important thing about your blog’s design is the user experience. So don’t prioritize “pretty” over usability. Trust me, although a super fancy and beautiful website is really nice to have, what is most important is the quality of experience your website gives to its visitors.
So don’t overly obsess about how amazing the blog could LOOK – as long as visitors know how to easily find what they are looking for, and as long as you provide extremely valuable information, establish credibility and create engagement, your investments will surely pay off.
Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr
3. Listbuilding Elements
One of the most important feature your business blog must have is the list building element.
Building your list will transform your business into a sustainable business, because it will enable you to generate leads and communicate with those leads over and over again.
Over time, as you build trust and credibility and build relationship by providing so much value to them, they will eventually trust you and buy from you or buy products your recommend.
When you get a business blog, make sure you get one that has a customised opt-in section (either on the sidebar or a pop-up opt-in, just like in www.easisell.com/blog) with a proven high-converting design and copy. You will need to create a freebie to give away in exchange for the prospect’s name and email, so get started putting together a freebie now (make one that really rocks, like our Digital Marketing E-guide). It’s been shown that you’ll have more people subscribe to your list if there’s a visual representation of your freebie. So as much as possible, hire a graphic designer to create an illustration of what it is you are giving away.
You will also need an autoresponder linked to your opt-in and set it up so that it automatically sends an email to your subscribers notifying them every time you post a new blog post. On top of these updates, you also want to build a relationship with your subscribers by sending them valuable tips, videos or content about once to twice a week. The autoresponder we use and highly recommend is AWeber, due to its ease of use and reliability.
3. Integrated with Social Media
The best way to leverage your blog is to drive traffic to it using the best Social Media platforms for business: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIN.
You will need to learn how to use these social media platforms, and then you must integrate these platforms with your Business blog.
Make it so that your blog enables readers to connect with you on Facebook /Twitter/LinkedIn/YouTube directly from your blog.
The more people you connect with using these platforms, the more traffic you will build up over time.
Also, get a blog with Social Media sharing enabled. This simply means having a blog set up so that they are literally one-button click away from sharing your content with their social networks.
Of course, have the RSS feed set up and configured so that it’s extremely easy to subscribe to your blog, too.
4. Search Engine Optimized
Search Engine Optimization for blogs involves configuring certain elements of your blog (Onpage SEO) and building links to your blog (Off Page SEO) using Social Media marketing tactics so that it could attract more traffic from the search engines.
One of the main things that will truly help is conducting Keyword Research so that you know what keywords your target market are typing in the Search Engines when they are looking for offers like yours. Once you have these keywords, you could then create your blog’s content around these keywords, to increase the likelihood for your blog posts to appear on the top of the search engines for those highly-searched-for keywords.
If you have a well-researched keyword list, and you use them as basis for deciding what to write about, your blog could have increased chances to attract more perpetual traffic at no cost.
5. Plug-ins That Help Drive Traffic, Increase Engagement, & Make Your Life Easier are Installed and Properly Configured
A Plug-in is a tool that adds a specific functionality to your blog, and you simply install it as an “add on”.
There are plug ins that help you get more traffic; there are ones that make it easier for your viewers to share your links to their friends/colleagues; There are Plug ins that help you build your list; there are plug ins that help boost the level of engagement with your audience; etc.
There are many plug ins available that you can add to your blog – and most of them are free.
However, many business blogs don’t have business-boosting plug-ins installed mainly because business owners hardly have any time to read up and keep up to date with these things.
But, by not using the best plug ins, you are leaving so much money on the table, because your blog could attract more traffic IF it has plug-ins that are configured properly to boost your blog’s traffic-pulling ability, engagement and conversion.
Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr
6. Elements That Measure Your Blog’s KPIs
If you are going to blog, treat it like any other marketing campaign – measure its effectiveness and your ROI.
Questions you might want to ask every month to measure your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are:
- Is your traffic growing?
- Are you getting new links? If so, from where?
- What Social Media Platform is driving the most traffic to your blog? (and are they converting?)
- Which Blog posts seem to be getting a lot of attention/ the least attention?
- How many leads has the blog generated so far? And is the number of leads increasing? (i.e., is your subscriber number growing? How fast?)
You can use Statcounter or Google Analytics to gain intelligence about the effectiveness of your internet marketing efforts. From this you will be able to make informed decisions on how to best move forward.
If SEO and Social Media are going to be the major traffic strategy you’re going to utilize, I recommend you complement Google Analytics by using Market Samurai to track your links, your search engine rankings, and to reverse engineer your top competitors’ SEO strategies, etc.
Download Your Checklist
To download your Blog Buyer’s Guide Checklist click here.
How to Succeed with Your Business Blog
Of course, having an awesome-looking, kick-ass business blog set up and configured for you with is just the beginning. The real work begins when your web developer hand over your blog to you.
The success of your blog will really depend on you – the quality of your content, the frequency of your posts, the level of engagement you’re able to create with your audience, the amount of traffic it gets, and the effectiveness of your sales funnel.
So once you have it set up, you will then need to learn and implement:
- How to write attention-grabbing blog titles (Titles are VERY important)
- How to create engaging, remarkable content that gets passed on
- How to drive traffic to your blog using SEO
- How to drive traffic to your blog/offers using Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN)
- How to do Video Marketing
- How to get more and more subscribers
- How to build a solid relationship with your subscribers
- How to convert your leads into buyers in a more streamlined fashion
If you’re feeling overwhelmed already, it is totally understandable.
We at Easisell recognize the challenges that businesses face when they first start marketing online. That’s why we are in the process of putting together some blog packages that meet the needs of small businesses and solo entrepreneurs.
Unlike other blog developers though, we won”t just stop at providing well-designed blog packages with all the ideal functionalities and elements, but we will also arm you with the basics of what you need to know about list building, traffic generation, Social Media, and of course, lead conversion!
Feel free to forward this blog post to business owners you know who still aren’t blogging. Share it on your Facebook profile, Tweet it or forward the link (Thank you!).
What Business Are You In? (And Why It’s Often Not What You Think!)
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If we were to ask you what your MAIN role is in your business, what would you say?
We’ve asked this before and the answers we receive almost always sound like this:
A barber would say, “cutting hair.”
A website developer would say “creating websites.”
A restaurateur would say, “preparing delicious food.”
A coach would say, “helping people be better, brighter and happier.”
While these answers are partially true, it’s also a fact that one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a small business owner is to think like this.
So what’s the correct answer? The correct answer is – your main role in your business is MARKETING your business, and the sooner you really get this, the sooner the cash will flow.
There are a lot of highly skilled, well-meaning “experts” (or “Technicians”) that really know their stuff. They’ve spent a lot of time training and educating themselves in their field of expertise. One day, thinking they could make a business out of their skills, they set up shop, believing that if they only do their job right, the customers would flood in.
Of course this is rarely a successful strategy. Many of these experts will end up closing down their business precisely because they were still thinking like experts.
To be an entrepreneur, you need to wear a different hat. (This actually reminds me of Michael Gerber, author of E-Myth, who described the above scenario as a case of “a technician having an entrepreneurial seizure”)
On the other hand, there are restaurateurs who serve food that tastes like cardboard and yet one could hardly find an empty chair in their restaurants. There are businesses that sell weird, useless things but people wait excitedly in line to buy their stuff.
The fact is, you can be a lousy provider of goods and services, but great marketing can compensate for it all. Just look at McDonald’s!
Don’t get us wrong. We aren’t advocating that you provide lousy offers – we’re merely demonstrating how marketing is truly the lifeblood of ANY business, and so it is critical for you as the business owner to really identify yourself as a marketer first and foremost.
So drill this in your head for best results: marketing is your main business.
I invite you to re-evaluate how you are managing your business and ask yourself how you’re currently spending your time, and what high ROI activities can you do more of in order to bring in the moolah (that’s money, baby!).
What we’ve shared here may require a radical change in the way you see things. But if you want your business to really thrive, you must make the shift. (We should know – we made the same mistake – and we’re actually in the marketing business!)
If this post served you in any way, I invite you to:
In a future post, I plan to share my experiences and thoughts about the most common limiting beliefs we entrepreneurs have that are centered around marketing (and how to burst them once and for all!). Is this something you’d be interested in?
By the way, speaking of marketing your business, we’re currently in the process of launching blog packages specifically designed for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs in mind. If you’re one of those businesses who are still NOT blogging and actively marketing online, then you are literally killing your business for not doing so.
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