Tom Coombe — June 6, 2018 — June 6, 2018
Imagine you’re throwing a party, and a lot of people turn up. It’s a great party, and you don’t even mind that some of the guests are people you didn’t actually invite and don’t even really know. Still, the friends that you did invite, they’re the ones you really value.
That’s a good way to think about organic traffic: it’s the best kind of web traffic because it brings in users who are interested in what you make or do and are more likely to become a customer.
And one of the best ways to bring this traffic to your website is by keeping a well-written, well-maintained blog.
1. Know Your Audience
As you’ve embarked on your inbound marketing journey, you’ve likely started to build buyer personas, the fictional versions of your ideal customer.
If you know who they are, you’ve begun to define your audience, and once you’ve done that, you know what you should be writing about.
As you write posts, you’ll get feedback, whether it’s from replies directly on the blog, emails from readers, or comments on social media. All of these are valuable methods for you to know your audience.
2. Be Relevant
If you know your audience, you know what they’re searching for. The blog topics you create should reflect those phrases. When your audience finds content that they value, they’re more likely to share it on Facebook or Twitter, or link to it from their own blog.
This helps you build links, which is another way you’ll get found. As you build up your blog, be sure to link back to previous posts and other sections of your website, another SEO trick that drives organic traffic to your site. Readers like old posts. Hubspot analyzed its own blog earlier this year and found that 75 percent of its blog views and 90 percent of its blog leaders came from older posts.
You should also make sure the meta description for each post is one that will attract readers. This is a brief description – typically 150 characters or so – to let readers know why they should click to read what you’ve written.
Beyond that, be sure the blog posts you create are:
- Timely. They should deal with what your company is doing now. If you can work in topicsthat are trending, even better.
- Focused on what you do and your objectives.
- Trying to solve your audience’s problems. People who come to your blog aren’t all necessarily thinking, “Who’s the best [fill in your industry] company in town?” They might have found you because they have a problem they’re dealing with, so you should have posts that discuss solutions to those problems.
3. Use Other Blogs As A Guide.
“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” That quote gets credited to a lot of sources. So is it something we “copied”? Of course!
Let’s be clear: No one is suggesting that you plagiarize someone else’s work. Rather, we’re saying that if you find that someone else has written about what you do, it’s okay to use that as the topic inspiration for your own blog post. Just put it in your own words, with your own point of view.
4. More Blogging = More Leads
According to research from HubSpot, companies that posted 11 or more blog posts each month saw significantly more leads.
The numbers vary depending on whether the companies were B2C or B2B. B2C companies that posted more than 11 times each month ended up with four times as many leads as their counterparts posting only four or five times a month.
With B2B companies, the difference is slightly less, but still worth noting. Businesses that posted 11 or more times each month got 1.75 times more leads than B2B firms posting six to 10 times a month, and 3.75 times as many leads as those putting up three or less posts a month.
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