Would a blog on your website make a difference to your business?
One thing is for sure is that it will help your website get found in search engines. You’re giving people an opportunity to experience your company and your brand before they make a purchase. That can help foster brand loyalty and trust in the long term.
Are you ready to learn how to add a blog to your website? Keep reading to find out how.
You may be hesitant to add a blog to your website because it’s time-consuming. In actuality, you can’t afford not to add a blog to your website.
Websites with blogs get 126% more leads than sites that don’t have a blog. Not only that, but your SEO will be impacted, too.
One of the big buzzwords in SEO these days is user intent. Google is seeing organic search as a step in the buyer’s journey. Some searches signal that a person is ready to make a purchase. Other searches are for product research.
Your goal is to get in front of potential customers early in the buying cycle. That’s because Google is using artificial intelligence and things like a person’s search history and past website visits to determine search results later in the buying cycle. If someone clicks on your site early on, the more likely your site will appear at the top of search results when they’re ready to make a purchase.
You can use a blog to engage with buyers early in the buying cycle. Your content can be about product reviews, how to guides and other topics that are important to your audience.
Technically speaking, it’s pretty easy to add a blog to your website, especially if you use WordPress. After all, that’s what it was originally built for.
There are some things that you need to do beforehand before you launch your blog to ensure its success.
The main purpose of a blog isn’t to drive traffic to your website. It’s to add value to your readers. These are your customers and potential customers that will come to trust your brand for your expertise.
You want to make sure that you’re writing about topics that people are interested in, which means you need to do research. This will also help you find the keywords to use in your articles. That will help your articles get found in search engines.
Start by writing down potential blog post ideas. These could be common questions that you get or challenges that your audience faces. A place to start is to have between 20-50 ideas written down.
This may seem like a lot, but you’ll be surprised by how quickly the ideas will come to you.
Your next step is to verify that those topics truly matter to your audience. A few tools you can use are Google search, BuzzSumo, and Ubersuggest.
These tools will show you what types of articles are popular, the specific search terms that people are using, and the popularity of those search terms.
Pinterest is an underrated tool to do blogging research. You’ll want to use this if your blog is related to popular niches like travel, health, fitness, food, and entrepreneurship.
Take some time to take the keywords you’ve come up with so far and see which articles are popular. You can tell what is getting popularity by the number of views and repins a pin has. That’s an indication that people are searching for that content in particular.
You’ll want to layout a content schedule for yourself.
Now comes the hard part – writing the content. Don’t get too hung up on writing the content. Don’t worry about being perfect. Just write.
Write your content like you were talking to a friend or a customer. You know what to say, you just have to sit down at the laptop to actually do it.
In order to reap the full benefits of having a blog, you need to commit to a regular schedule. This will show your audience that you’re reliable
Once you have a few articles ready to go, you can add the blog to your website. The technical side of adding a blog will depend on the content management system you’re using. In this example, we’ll focus on how to add a blog you’re your website using WordPress. That’s because WordPress powers about 30% of all websites.
If you already have a home page on your site, you’ll want to make sure that your blog and homepage are separate items. By default, WordPress has the blog page as the home page of a site.
You’ll need to create a page for your blog in addition to the pages you already have set up on your website.
In your WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings -> Reading. Go to the part where it says “Front Page Displays.” Make sure that this set to “A Static Page.” You’ll then assign your home page as the Front Page and then assign your blog page to be the Posts Page.
Learning how to add a blog to your website isn’t as hard as it seems. It’s a straightforward process where you research what matters to your audience, write a few articles to start, and then add them to your site.
The main thing to remember with a blog is that you have to be consistent. You need to make sure that you’re writing on a consistent basis, whether that’s once a week or more. The more consistent you are, the more likely you are to see results.
If your brand new blog needs a home, you’ll want to check out these hosting plans.
