When starting a business, you have so many action items handle that blogging may be the last thing on your list. You’re a businessperson, a numbers person, not a blogger–right?
Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you’re going to start a business–you need to have a business blog. For starters, it helps drive traffic to your website.
And, isn’t that what you want and need? Traffic that drives conversions?
Just think about all the ways people find your website. Each time you write a blog post, one more page on your website gets indexed.
This provides another opportunity to show up on search engines and drive traffic to your site. In addition, blogging helps to turn your incoming traffic into leads.
All you have to do is add a lead-generating call-to-action on every blog post. These call-to-actions can be free trials, free whitepapers, free ebooks, and more.
By blogging regularly, you will also establish subject-based authority within your industry. If you are consistently creating content that is helpful to your target customer, then you will gain credibility very quickly.
This is especially beneficial for sales and service professionals. If prospects often find answers to their questions on your site, they are much more likely to trust your sales process.
Moreover, blogging gives you long-term results through search engines. One day you might get 200 views and 20 leads. The next day, people find it on social media, and you get 100 more views and 10 more leads.
Blog posts can be self-perpetuating tools for business success. There are other benefits, such as using your blog to test out new campaigns or share information on product releases and events.
So, are you ready to start blogging? Here are five business tools to help you get moving today.
Keyword Planner & Research Tool
Before you get started creating blog posts, you will need to perform keyword research. This is possibly one of the most important steps to take.
The objective is to locate varying terms and phrases that your target audience will use to find the type of content you intend to publish. You can’t leave this up to a guessing game. Thank goodness for Google Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro.
These websites allow you to enter keywords, then send you a list of suggested terms along with their search volume–this is the average number of people that will look for that specific term each month on Google.
Furthermore, Long Tail Pro gives you extra filtering options and more data. So, take some of the keywords you receive from the Keyword Planner and enter them into Long Tail Pro. You will get phrases that are over three words long, which are more targeted to a specific audience and less competitive.
Email to Fax
When coming up with ideas for your blog posts, it is definitely important to collaborate with a colleague, mentor or friend. You just don’t want to post anything that comes to mind.
It has to be relevant to your products and services, and especially, it must resonate with your target audience. Naturally, you also want it to be something that will be unique and valuable for your prospects–it needs to address a pain point.
So, you don’t want to let everyone know of your upcoming topics, otherwise, your competitors can snatch your ideas right before your eyes. This is where you can use eFax to send topic ideas to only those you trust the most.
In fact, you can send a fax right from your phone. The messages are encrypted so, you don’t have to worry about anyone else seeing them outside of your intended recipients. Plus, you’ll feel confident having a second set of eyes determining whether your topic list makes the most sense for your blog.
If you haven’t used BuzzSumo yet, I highly recommend that you try it now. Once you do, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t used this tool sooner.
BuzzSumo helps you come up with different titles focused on your keywords. But, one of its most powerful features is finding existing blog posts that already use your keywords.
You also get to see which blog posts have been shared the most on social media. So, you have an idea of what consumers want.
You can even search to see what content your competitors are sharing. After that, you can create more comprehensive versions of their most popular content to get better views.
Graphic Design Software
Blogs with pure text are boring, and visitors will zone them out. You wouldn’t like to look at just text, would you? It reminds you too much of those long college papers that were a pain to write and read. With your blog posts, spruce them up with charts, infographics, images, and other visually appealing visuals.
This is exactly what Canva helps you do [EDITOR’S NOTE: We often use Canva here at Return On Now for image customization]. The tool has several templates to fit your blog’s style and design. They can also be configured for any website or social media profile. Pretty cool, isn’t it?
To-do list & Reminders
This tool presents a highly useful to-do list. You might come up with ideas all throughout the day and forget them just as easily if you don’t save them somewhere.
Wunderlist helps organize your ideas into tasks and subtasks. It also lets you create listicle ideas so you never miss out on great blogging strategies.
Summary
To be successful, every business needs a blog. Thankfully, you have the right tools at your disposal to point you in that exact direction.
Featured Image Credit: Literalis. CC 0; Public Domain. View original image on Flickr here.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Katrina Manning
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- Five Business Tools to Support your Blogging Efforts - December 28, 2016
