By Emily Hill

A well-written blog is an essential part of any content strategy. It gives your existing customers and contacts something new and interesting to read, whilst simultaneously drawing in new customers through the search engines (assuming you’ve optimised the content, tags and links with the correct keywords, of course).

Amazingly, many companies don’t have a blog on their website and as such are missing out on a brilliant opportunity to increase their profits. According to a recent Hubspot study, blogging can increase web traffic by 55%; this is a huge increase in traffic that can lead to a similarly impressive increase in customers and profit.

Why, then, would any company choose to forego a blog altogether?

It may be a question of time or resources, especially for any business owners who aren’t too confident with the written word.

With a good brief, a content agency can take over the publication of your blog for you. If you would like to have a crack at your own blog though, you’ll find that these few simple tips and tricks can help inspire you.

Help your readers

A good blog should help you with your digital marketing strategy, whilst focusing on being useful and interesting to your readers. It’s not just an advert, where you push products on to your customers with your hard sell hat on.

For example, a clothing company may want to promote their summer dress collection in their blog. Simply posting a few links to dresses and saying how great they are won’t engage your readers. However, posting the same links in a blog about the best way to wear summer dresses – interesting, helpful advice – will be of far greater interest and will have a more positive impact on sales and indeed customer retention.

Get organised and mix it up!

Creating a content schedule will help you to stay organised, stop you having to think of ideas at the last minute and ensure that you don’t end up re-purposing the same content every couple of weeks. Try scheduling month by month and aim for a new blog every day.

As for the content itself, try mixing things up between comment pieces, top tip posts (“Ten ways to hold a sale”) and news posts reacting to current events relevant to your industry or product.

Make it SEO-friendly

Here’s perhaps the most vital point of all: remember those all-important keywords which your prospective customers will be using to find your products and services through the search engines. Remember the three T’s: title, text and tags. Your keywords need to appear in each of these blog elements.

Use two or three keywords a few times throughout your blog article and don’t forget to monitor the results to see if you’re on the right track. SEO is actually becoming quite an advanced science, and the right keywords are essential. Don’t try to optimise “dress” – it’s a generic term and will have far too much competition. Optimise “summer print dresses” instead and you’ll have a much better chance of your blog article appearing in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for this term.

Market your blog

Once you’ve written your blog article, don’t forget to link to it from your Facebook and Twitter pages along with any other suitable social or business networking sites that you might be using. While the search engines should bring some traffic into your blog if you’ve used your keywords properly, it’s always a good idea to market your blog actively as well. Social media is the perfect way to do this, as it’s both real-time and free of charge.

About the author

Emily Hill is the Managing Director of Write My Site. She oversees a team of UK-based bloggers, journalists and editors. Write My Site develops and implements content strategies for clients and agencies who want to create an energetic online presence. Their content services extend across websites, blogs, article directories and social media platforms. Relevant links

http://www.writemysite.co.uk

Hubspot blogging survey: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5014/Study-Shows-Small-Businesses-That-Blog-Get-55-More-Website-Visitors.aspx

Write My Site agencies page: http://www.writemysite.co.uk/web-content/agency-support/