Video Guide: Blogging for Business

Hi, my name’s Andy. I’m one of the digital marketing executives here at Koozai, and today we’re going to be talking about blogging for business.

Recently we’ve had quite a few customers ringing up asking if they should start blogging, whether they should have a blog on their site and whether it’s going to be beneficial to them. So today I’m going to go through a few pointers, and hopefully this will answer a few basic questions for you.

Let’s start with the benefits of a blog. Now the first one’s quite an obvious one. Blogs brings new content to your site on a regular
basis. As we all know, Google loves content, and content is king. So as long as you keep it up to date, then that’s going to be highly beneficial for you.

As well, it helps to promote your business. The more that you’re talking about yourself, the more you’re getting your message out there, the more people are going to know about you.

Also, it helps to create internal links as well. So if you’re talking about a specific product that’s within your range, you can naturally link to that child page. Obviously, again, the more you blog about your products, the more you can link to them.

Of course, it’s good for local SEO as well. If you’re targeting a specific location or an area that you’re working in, the more you talk about it, the more it associates you with that location. So that’s beneficial as well.

There are two obvious platforms that you can set your blog up on, and that’s WordPress and Blogger. They’re probably the most famous ones. There are others, like Tumblr and Posterous, but they’re more for personal blogs, so you’d probably avoid those. These two blogs can be integrated into your site, which is of course beneficial to you. It helps to add the new content to your site as well.

Basic SEO plug-ins that you want to look at as well if you’re going to be using any of these two blogs are, the famous one is
the All in One SEO, which is for WordPress. This will set your title tags in your meta descriptions and all that sort of information. For Blogger, you’ll probably want to look at something like Title Hack and Automatic Meta Tags, and again, they sort out your title tags for you.

Some SEO pointers, if you are going to install these sort of plug-ins and SEO is going to be important to you, make sure that your title tags are punchy, they’re to the point, and they’re beneficial. They’ll make people want to read your blog posts, basically.

Meta descriptions, again, keep them quite short, about 155 characters. Be to the point. Don’t fill them full of keywords or anything like that. Get your message across. Make sure when you do a new blog post that you assign it to a category. So if anyone comes to your blog and they decide to do a search under a certain category, they’re going to find a relevant blog post
to go with that.

Tag them as well. These are more keyword related. So if you’re selling dog food, then assign it dog food, dogs, pet supplies, anything like that. Also add the “Read More” tag. This is the tag where you can cut the first paragraph of your blog in half, and you have to click the “Read More” in order to read more of that information. If you don’t add anything like this, then what you’ll find is that on the homepage of your blog, you’ll have the entire blog post there. People can then take your content away.

We’ve had a look at the basics there. So what should you write about? This is an area that a lot of people aren’t comfy about when they start a blog. They often ask us, “What should we be writing about?” And they ask for pointers along those areas.

Well, there are no specific stats that go with this, but I think this is a good way to look at how you should set your blog up, and that is, if you think that 50% of your blog posts should be industry-related, 25% should be on company promotion, and 25% should be looking at company publicity.

Now, the way I’ve set it up like this is because if you did nothing but company promotion, you’re probably not going to attract as many people to your blog as you would if you included industry-related blog posts. If we look at industry-related blog posts, these can be anything related to the sector that you’re in. It gives you a chance to be a voice in the industry.

It gives you a chance to talk about your opinions. If there’s some news that comes out that’s related to you, you can voice your opinion on that. It can also start discussions and it can bring people in. People can leave comments. You can then start talking to them, and you can build up relationships that way as well.

If we look at company promotion, this should be more about offers that you’re providing on your website. You might have a sale on. You might be offering coupons or discounts, or you might even run a promotion where anyone who reads a particular blog post can have a certain amount off in your store or anything like that.

Company publicity, this should be more about what you’re doing as a company. If you’re sponsoring events, if you’re helping out locally, then blog about it.

So hopefully that’s given you a basic insight as to how you should set up your blog, the sort of things that you should be writing about, the type of benefits that it’s going to give you, and obviously we’ve done a few SEO pointers as well. Hopefully that’s answered a few basic questions for you.

I’ve been Andy Williams. Make sure you check out our blog site for more information. There is also our YouTube channel. Make sure you subscribe to that, and also like us on our Facebook page.