The Internet is serious business beset by a sea of competitors fumbling for that top spot on Google. I’m here to help you begin the steps to forming a plan to quit fumbling for a better SERP (search engine result page) position. It’s rather simple, so the cold sweats and shaky hand trying to “X” out of this page can stop now. In creating a proper blog for your business, you need to know three things. Why three things? Well, if there were more steps, you would have already lost the interest of an incredibly fickle marketplace.
LEARN
There have been businesses working their magic on the Internet since the Clinton Administration. 20 years on, this might seem a bit daunting to a business with a burgeoning online presence. That means you have 20 years of people failing, learning and succeeding to study. Imagine if you had those kinds of resources at your fingertips when you began your business. So many businesses fail online by repeating the mistakes of the past. Those mistakes live on forever online and they form a map that later readers can discover and plot their way.
Your business needs to learn why they must have a blog and how to best develop it. If you’re a service based organization, then you have a degree of knowledge under your belt. If you’re a design/intellectual property oriented firm, then show off examples of what you have to offer. Consumers wants to be enticed into staying, plus they want to know what they’re getting into with you as a business partner. From there, you can build a plan to attract those that you want to visit.
IMPLEMENT
Once you have a plan, it’s time to examine the logistics of implementing it. You’re going to blog, that’s a given. You have solicited questions from your customers, employees and you even managed to jot a few down. How many times a week are you going to blog? What time of day are you going to blog? These are all questions that you need to be able to answer before you start hammering out that first post.
When you should you publish? If you’re a high traffic site, I’d time my posts to three a week on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. That way you can capture both ends of the weekend traffic, while carrying the business week with fresh content. If you’re a mid to low traffic site, I’d recommend once a week but with hyperlinks to specific items that you want to target on your website. Time of day is important, especially in the 24/7 age of the internet. Basically, time your initial posting to cover the business crowd of the 9 to 5 world. From there, your material will have time to aggregate, index and appear on various RSS feeds. That will keep the material circulating and fresh for those that don’t operate in your time zone or towards typical business hours.
Pictures and related images can help flesh out ideas that might be hard to explain in a line of text boxes on a tiny computer screen. Pictures also index in addition to your content, so can have Google pull your material up through the image search filter and double your chances of indexing with a higher SERP. It’s not an exact science, but there are more and more ways appearing with every week to influence your implementation plans.
REPEAT
The key to success with a blog is repeating your working plan. That doesn’t mean repeating the same blog over and over and over again. In time, that material does get indexed by Google. If you can find that blog indexed through a basic search, move onto the next topic. You’re not a one idea business and Google knows this. Repeating your content plan and implementing thoughtful material will show Google that you are a trusted site. Trusted sites get backlinks, backlinks influence Page Authority and before long…you’re sitting on top of the Google World.
Your blog won’t take off overnight and it might take consumers awhile to grow accustomed to obtaining knowledge via that route. However, this blog will become an indexable and searchable welcome mat to the hordes of new consumers searching online. This is a great wide world of interconnected business that has blossomed into an age of abundance. There are consumers out there that you never met and are in desperate need of what you have to offer. Approach them with your welcoming blog and always remember…
LEARN!
IMPLEMENT!
REPEAT!