Need to improve search engine rankings and establish brand authority? We’ll you’ve ended up at the right place. We’ll cover everything for those wondering how to start a blog in 2022. This guide will focus on WordPress, but the strategies and concepts can be applied to any CMS you may choose.
What Is A Blog and Why Should You Start One?
Put simply, a blog is a platform for companies or individuals to voice their expertise, thoughts, strategies, and opinions online. Blogs make for some of the most engaging content on the web. Over 70% of the internet reads or interacts with a blog according to multiple sources online. A company or individual blog assists in adding value behind your brand, resulting in surmountable increases in overall site traffic. For most businesses, a blog does not have to be the fulcrum of your site. Instead, many choose to use a blog as an additional marketing tool in their arsenal.
How To Create A Blog To Market Online
When wondering how to start a blog, plan ahead for the strategies that you would like to instill from the beginning. In doing so, you’ll increase the likelihood of site growth and post interaction.
Optimize for Search Engines (SEO)
Search engines and blogs go hand and hand. In fact, many companies and individuals choose to start a blog simply to function as an effective ranking medium. Blogs serve as a platform to integrate additional content into a website, without the added burden of page design and development. When starting a blog for SEO purposes, write posts that add context to the page content of your site. For instance, at Renewal Digital we write posts on WordPress to provide users and search engines context of our WordPress website design service. Blog posts do not necessarily need to introduce new ideas into your site, instead they are often used to build ranking authority.Â
Check out our latest guide on creating an SEO blog.
Link Building Opportunities
Link building is one of the most essential strategies in SEO. Due to the nature of blogging, link building opportunities seem to present themselves in numerous ways. For instance, a seasoned blogger may write an article on SEO strategies and publish it on a high authority site. A SEO practitioner may reach out to the post author asking for a backlink with keyword-rich anchor text targeted towards a related page or post of their own. In fact, some of the most valuable backlinks are built in this manner. Many times, a point of leverage is used to earn the backlink from the high-authority post author. Sometimes this could include a backlink from your site to theirs or writing their site a guest post, etc.
Establish Brand Expertise
Blogs do more than just improve rankings. Use each post as a way to express individual or company expertise in a particular niche. Audiences engage most with content that teaches, explains, or solves a problem that they are experiencing. Position your brand to respond to these pain points. Posts focused on solutions help to establish the expertise your brand has in its niche. For example, Renewal Digital excels at designing WordPress sites. To back our expertise, we would write a post such as “Why Should I Use WordPress?” Having the ability to easily elaborate on subject matter aids in conveying experience.
How To Start A Blog For Direct Response Marketing
Give, Give, Give, Then Ask
One of the fundamental drives in direct response marketing is to give, give, give, then ask. In short, this strategy is designed to provide vast amounts of complementary value to your audience so that you position yourself as the clear choice for purchasing products and services.
To apply the ideas behind give, give, give, then ask to a blog, write post content that your competitors would otherwise charge for. Let’s use digital agencies as an example. Agency A will charge $500 to perform an SEO audit on a client’s website. Agency B will instead write a step-by-step post on how to perform an SEO audit on your website. Even though Agency B could very well charge for a site audit, providing the outlined process for the client to do it on their own (for free) positions them as the more unsparing agency partner of the two. Give, give, give, then ask is rarely this simple in the real world, but this example does a thorough job explaining the concept.
Expand Audience Outreach
How To Start A Blog Post
Implementing SEO strategies and merit-worthy content will aid greatly in earning larger market share. Audiences feel connected to brands that they’ve seen the most and that provide the most value. Search engine optimization get’s your brand in front of the masses, while detailed content creates the personal connection that brands need to make in order to sell their products and services.
In addition, content and SEO are intertwined beyond the surface level. Content that keeps readers engaged is rewarded by search engines with higher rankings. No matter how technically optimized a page or post is, a page with low bounce rates and high engagement tends to rank higher than the opposite. In short, don’t slack on the content you’re producing. Publish consistent content that users and search engines value in order to maximize the growth your blog generates for your site.
