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Blogging for Business
Hi there, I’m Sumit Saxena from Team Unstoppable. This Blogging for Business guide is based on Ahrefs’ research study. And I’m excited to present to you Blogging for Business.
It is a very detailed cut-to-the-chase Blog that will teach you how to grow traffic to your blog and turn it into a customer acquisition channel for your business.
Three things.
First: In terms of traffic, If now your blog getting less than 15,000 visitors per month. You can increase up to over 150,000 visitors per month to your website through blogging.
We will figure out the tactics and strategies that actually work. So in this blog, you’ll learn a lot about blogging for your business and startups with actionable content marketing and SEO strategies.
Second: seeing your blog traffic grow is obviously both exciting and satisfying. But you’re running a business, right?
The last time I checked, they didn’t accept traffic in the banks. So you have to make sure that you’re attracting the kind of traffic that will convert into paying customers for your business.
That’s why I named this blog “Blogging for business.”
Finally, number three: What about growing an audience, list building, and starting a blog from scratch. These three things are the real icing on the cake, trust me.
So, what are you even waiting for! Grab this blog till the end!
Welcome to lesson #1: "The compound effect of content marketing"
Here’s the agenda for this lesson. We’ll start off with what should be your primary goal if you’re blogging for business, not as a hobbyist.
So here we go.
Part 1: The primary goal of blogging for business.
I never had a goal of growing traffic to my blog only for readership. My primary goal has always been acquiring new customers and growing my business.
What’s the point of going viral and bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to a blog if none of them will buy from you, right?
It may be good for your ego, but not for the bank account. So instead of trying to generate as much blog traffic as we could, we focused our efforts on bringing highly targeted visitors, who would convert into customers and bring money to our business.
You should treat your blog as a customer-generating channel, not a traffic-generating channel. Unless of course, you make money out of raw traffic.
Like selling banner ads for example. In that case, more traffic will obviously bring more money. But we are not discussing how to create a media empire and make money with advertising.
I don’t have any experience with that. I will tell you about creating a blog that will drive customers to your business.
Part 2: The main customer acquisition channels.
- Word of Mouth
- Rank on Google
- Advertising
How do people discover products and services to buy online?
Nothing beats a recommendation from friends and someone you trust. Great products tend to generate lots of buzz on social media and drive sales like crazy.
That’s called word of mouth.
Your good products and services lead you to new customers through word of mouth.
When people search for something on Google and find you more easily than other businesses offering the same product or service, your customers will be more likely to buy from you.
It is possible when you are ranking on google at the top only. You need to focus on your Search Engine Optimization for your website.
And finally, advertising.
You can spend money to promote the content, that talks about your product instead of promoting the actual product directly. It may sound counterintuitive, but quite often the content that promotes your product will have a much higher conversion rate than a sales page for that product.
Part 3: The main reason why most blogs fail.
There’s a lot of hype around content marketing these days. Every online business wants to have a successful blog, but the problem is, most companies have absolutely no clue how to run a blog.
I was doing everything that “guru” bloggers were teaching. I did indeed see some results.
All these activities help me to get huge traffic and engagements but my bank account is not got any increment.
I was getting better and better at executing different content marketing tactics, but I couldn’t figure out how all these tactics come together into a single strategy that would grow my blog and drive customers to our business.
As long as you invest your time and effort into publishing new articles and promoting them in every way you can, your traffic seems to be growing.
This is where the popular “you should publish new content regularly” advice comes from.
But as soon as you stop publishing new content, the results that you have achieved so far will start fading almost instantly.
But it shouldn’t be this way. Because this is not what growth looks like. I can only call this kind of performance “survival.”
So the rest of this course will be focused on a single goal. How to create articles that bring consistent targeted traffic that doesn’t fade.
Welcome to the lesson #2.
In this lesson we’ll be discussing two major strategies of growing a blog with their pros and cons. So, here’s the agenda for this lesson.
We’re going to start from studying the anatomy of the “spike of hope.” Then I’m going to break down two major strategies of growing a blog and the challenges that they bring.
Then I’m going to bust the “you should publish more often” myth once and for all. And finally, I’m going to say a just few words about the importance of converting random visitors of your blog into regular readers.
So let’s go!
Part 1. The anatomy of the "spike of hope"
Well, what’s the first thing you do after you publish a new article? You share it with your existing audience. You send an email to your email subscribers, you share the link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social network where you have some followers.
In other words, you’re asking your existing audience to come to your blog, because you have something new for them.
That’s the first section in your “spike of hope.” And the size of this section is determined by the size of your existing audience.
Which means that if you’re just starting out, this section would be quite tiny, if any at all. But most importantly, there are no new people in this group.
where your target audience is hanging out.
But if you’ve been consistently sharing your content with this community for the past few months, most of the people there would know you by now.
So this promotion channel is only effective when starting out, but over time the amount of new people that you can reach this way will drastically decrease.
And that was the second part of your “spike of hope.”
So what’s the last one?
It’s the word of mouth.
This is the traffic that comes to your article when people from the first two sections share it with their friends and followers.
This often happens passively, which means that you don’t have to do anything other than publish great content that people will genuinely want to share.
With a pinch of SEO magic applied, your article will start ranking in Google for some relevant search queries, and this will bring you consistent traffic that will not fade over time.
Traffic from Google takes time to build up, while generating buzz on relevant communities and social media seems like a much faster way to bring people to your blog and grow your traffic numbers.
Part 2. Two major strategies of growing a blog
So on one hand we have “viral traffic,” the one that comes as a result of generating buzz on relevant communities and reaching out to influencers asking for support.
On the one hand, there is “SEO traffic”, which comes from optimizing your website so that it shows up at the top of search results on Google.
So, which strategy is easier and more effective?
First of all, I have to mention that these are actually two extreme cases, which in reality don’t exist one without the other.
I mean there’s no way to consistently go viral and not get a single visitor from Google.
As well as there’s no way to pull massive traffic from Google and not have a single person share your content on Twitter or Facebook. If your goal is to attract viral traffic, you should be able to create content that resonates with your target audience.
It should resonate with them so much that they won’t be able to resist the urge to share it with others.
That’s the challenge #1.
But virality doesn’t happen out of nowhere. You need to get support from influential people
in your industry, who will promote your content to their huge audiences and kick start the viral effect.
Influential people are insanely hard to pitch, so that’s the challenge #2.
And finally, the goal of your blog is to consistently reach new people, who will become your new customers.
So if you rely on viral spikes of traffic, you’ll have to regularly produce sticky viral content and regularly get support from industry influencers.
Because if you stop publishing, your traffic will fade.
And that’s the challenge #3.
Now what are the challenges of growing your blog with SEO traffic, that comes from Google?
Well, your content still needs to be awesome. It doesn’t necessarily need to resonate with
people that much, but it has to be insanely useful to them.
Which is still a challenge, if you ask me. However, the real challenge is to get backlinks to your piece of content.
Because backlinks is one of the key things that push you up in Google search results. And building backlinks is something that most people struggle with.
But here’s something positive about SEO traffic. You don’t have to publish regularly!
That’s because the traffic from Google doesn’t fade over time. Unless of course your competitors put enough work to outrank you.
But I’m about teach you how to make sure that it won’t happen.
“Viral vs. SEO”
First of all, most newbie bloggers have a wrong understanding of how viral traffic works.
Here is the picture that they have in their head:
You publish an article and tweet it to your followers.
Some of them like it and tweet it to their followers, some of their followers like it and tweet it to their followers.
This goes on and on and because of this snowball effect your article goes viral and gets tons of traffic. Right? Wrong!
Content only goes viral if exposed to a super-huge audience. In other words, someone with a huge twitter following has to tweet your article, so that thousands of his followers would retweet it to their followers.
These two steps of the viral outburst bring the most traffic and visibility.
The fact that an influencer has tweeted something, doesn’t mean that all his followers will pick it up and retweet it.
That is why the top 2 challenges of viral content that I’ve listed earlier are:
Creating super-sticky content that everyone would want to share with others; And pitching the biggest influencers in your space to kick-start the viral effect.
Both of these challenges are incredibly hard to crack. And that is why I am not a fan of chasing viral content.
