3 Foundation Stones to Make Your Business Blog Profitable

Every business should have a blog. It helps with everything from customer engagement to search engine ranking. Blogging does take resources, in terms of both money and time, but the benefit can more than repay the investment if you base your blog on these three principles.

Focus

You can never be all things to all people. Your website is not the next Amazon.

Image by Jonathan Blackburn from Pixabay

You must focus on people who will buy from you. You know who these are, but to turn that into a helpful buyer persona, you need to work through a few questions. There are several different ways to build your ideal customer avatar. Pick one that will work well for your business and ensure that everyone from yourself down to your cleaners always has that avatar in mind: Turn it into an image and use that as a screensaver on every computer and place posters featuring your customer avatar in all employee-only areas.

Your blog should focus on helping your customers solve urgent problems.

Design

Visitors will make judgments about your business within seconds of landing on your blog – Appearances matter.

Your blog must use a theme that looks good as well as being fit for purpose.

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Finding the perfect theme by choosing randomly is never going to work out well. There are over eight thousand free themes, and countless more premium themes to choose from. How long do you have?

There are many WordPress themes for blogs to narrow the choice down to a manageable number. Choose a theme that can be personalized with your corporate colors and fonts, add your logo and images to make your blog unique. Gain more credibility with your readers by using photos of your people in the workplace rather than stock images.

Delegate responsibility for this part of your marketing to one person, and encourage your blogger to make personality shine through. Corporate-speak has no place in your communications with customers, even in a business-to-business blog. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Your blog can let customers get to know you and your operation.

List

Your blog is the best way to start building relationships with customers. Email is the best way to build on that start.

Image by Serhii G. from Pixabay

You need to send regular and useful emails to your list of subscribers.

The only way to send hundreds of emails regularly is to use an email marketing service. Customers are more likely to read emails you send using the best services because they are unlikely to be marked as spam.

Costs and levels of marketing solutions vary so there are scores of email marketing services to help find the most appropriate service for your business. If your customers find your emails useful, they are more likely to keep reading them and your unsubscribe numbers will be low. This is the key to building a list of email subscribers who become customers. Provide help and share your specialist knowledge rather than trying to sell via email – It is too easy for subscribers to hit the Unsubscribe link or mark your messages as spam. If they do that you will never see them again – lost email subscriber, lost opportunity.

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The value of your blog is difficult to quantify, but that does NOT mean it has no value. Blogging will contribute to your profits in different ways: You will rank higher in search engines, get more site visitors, more leads, and increase your authority.

There is much to gain, and if you follow these principles, you will be doing it the right way.