What is a business blog?
A blog can help you scale your business – without having to spend money on ads or spend all your time posting on social media.
Here’s what a business blog is and the best strategies to grow one.
Read on!
You’ll learn:
- What is a business blog, and how does it make money?
- Why should you start a business blog?
- How do you start a business blog?
- The best business blog examples
What is a business blog?
In business, blogging is about positioning yourself as an expert in your industry by sharing high-quality and content on your website.
Your content is typically about topics in your industry to help inform and guide your potential customers.Â
Now, you might hear some people say that blogging is “dead.”
But blogging is still today one of the best ways to get found on Google and other search engines, and marketers are quick to call it one of the top three ways to market and grow a business.
After all, Google is one of the most-visited websites online.
And when you optimize your website for search search engines like Google, you boost your chances of getting found by your ideal clients.
Eventually, a percentage of those readers will convert to email subscribers, leads, and paying customers. (You DO need the right type of blog, though. We’ll look at that below.)
As your blog grows, it also builds your brand, helps you reach more qualified job applicants, and so on.
Next, let’s discuss whether you should start a blog for your own business.
Why should you start a business blog?
The truth is, there’s no reason not to start a business blog.
Blogs are a vastly underrated tool for increasing website traffic, getting leads, building brand awareness, and scaling your business.
I speak from experience. In just two years, I scaled my blog – the one you’re reading right now! – to a multiple six-figure income stream. It’s still one of the most profitable marketing strategies I’ve ever used and I continue to grow my traffic and sales.
And it helped me create a more sustainable business. Instead of having to brainstorm new ad angles and hope ad costs don’t eat up all profitability, I have a predictable system that doesn’t require me to do much. (I’ve outsourced most of it to a marketing agency, Zalstrom, which I later bought into.)
The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System
for attracting more clients daily... without paid ads, social media, or "hustle"!
But what are the specific benefits of blogging?
Here are a few of my favorites:
- Businesses with blogs see 55% more website visitors
- Blogs increase lead growth for small businesses by more than 100%
- Blogging increases the likelihood of a positive ROI by 13Â
Specifically, blogging helps…
- Increase website traffic: Blog posts that are optimized for search engines show up in searches. That’s how you increase your traffic – people who are searching for your services or products find your website.
- Improve brand awareness: Being an industry leader and building trust using a blog will increase your brand awareness. Moreover, offering high-quality, expert advice increases your chances of being mentioned in industry publications.
- Increase profitability: Organic traffic is “free” (AKA you don’t pay for the traffic you get, even if you might pay for creating content). It’s typically far more profitable than ad traffic.
So, in short, yes – launching a blog will help grow your business. But how do you grow a blog?
How do you start a business blog?
To start a successful business blog, you need the right strategy.
And here are the exact steps you should take.
Find the right topics to blog about
There are millions of blogs on the internet – and to stand out and position yourself as the industry go-to, you have to talk about the right topics.
That means your posts have to be the best content in your niche.
They need to be two things:
- Entertaining, interesting, and easy to read. Include personal stories and anecdotes, but give your audience the information they want!
- Full of helpful information that makes them valuable. Yes, that means they’ll be a little longer, but that’s fine – after all, a post that’s just a few hundred words won’t get the job done the way a longer post would.
For reference, I like to write blog posts that are between 2,000 and 3,000 words long. That length allows me to explain the topic at hand, offer actionable advice, and explain how to implement that advice.
Improve your copywriting skills
A 2,000-word blog post is great… if you engage your readers. Otherwise, they’ll end up scrolling mindlessly and look elsewhere for guidance.
That’s why becoming a great copywriter is so important!
When writing your content, focus on copy that implements the four Cs: Clear, concise, compelling, and credible.
And you can become a great copywriter by creating content daily across your channels. The responses you get – or don’t get – will teach you to write better copy.
When I first started my business, my copy was boring and stiff. But then I started incorporating my personality and saw what resonated with my audience.
Use visuals
Include visuals to make your blogs more engaging.
You see, improving your copy skills takes time. But if you include YouTube videos (if you have a channel), graphs, images, or even images of yourself or your team, you’ll instantly make your posts more interesting and fun to read.
I personally tend to include my YouTube videos, client stories and testimonials, or (sometimes) goofy pictures of my dog Falco.Â
Optimize your blog
It doesn’t matter how good your content is – if you don’t optimize it for search engines, it probably won’t get a lot of traction.
Instead, you want to look at each blog post as an asset.
One way to implement SEO into your blog is to use the right keywords that will make your blog posts rank for certain keywords or phrases.
Think about what your target audience will likely search for and start there. If you’re a health coach in Malibu, they’d probably search for precisely that: “Health coach in Malibu.”
To find even more specific keywords, I recommend using Google Keyword Planner (or a paid tool like Ahrefs). When you land on one you’d like to use, make sure it’s mentioned in your blog post at least four times to make it searchable.
Of course, there’s more to optimizing your blog than just using a keyword phrase. Check out my guide on how to increase organic traffic.
Use a content calendar for consistency
You need to publish consistent content to grow your blog.
You see, you grow your authority by publishing blog posts every month.
And to keep up that consistency, you might use a content calendar. Find keywords for the next three months and plan ahead when you’ll publish each blog post.
Turn blog readers into leads
You need blog readers…but those readers should convert into leads for you to grow your business.
Again, your blog is about scaling your business and profitability by turning readers into clients.
While your content will build trust, the hard truth is that very few people will give you their email without a reason. You can overcome this obstacle by offering a lead magnet in your post, like a free PDF.
Here’s one of my own lead magnets:
So, what makes a good business blog? Let’s take a look at a few.
The best business blog examples
What does a good business blog look like?
I’ve included business blogs below to show you what your blog can look like.
As you’ll see, all of these examples include really helpful and valuable content.
They don’t just scratch the surface but share a lot of incredibly valuable information in every article.
LuisaZhou.com
Let’s start with my own blog.
I built this blog to help others learn how to create successful online businesses from scratch. On it, I talk about everything I wish I’d known when starting out.
We publish in-depth guides to help create results sustainably, marketing, and more. And we always focus on making each post the best it can be – I believe in building strong relationships with my audience.
But we don’t just offer information. We actually say what’s working (not just what’s trendy) and help you get those “aha’s” that help you move forward.
A few good resources include…
HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the best-known marketing companies in the industry. In just 15 years, they’ve reached 100,000 customers and earned $1 billion in recurring revenue annually.Â
Why did they grow so fast? Because they started blogging before they even built a product and focused solely on the pain they were trying to fix. The engagement they got was what drove their strategy.
Today, HubSpot produces over 50 pieces of content weekly, meaning it’s nearly impossible to beat their dominance – they rank #1 for more than 34,000 keywords.Â
Hubspot’s content includes most marketing and sales topics. Typically, the information they share covers most of any given topic.
Shopify
Since its founding in 2006, Shopify has become an ecommerce giant worth over $85 billion (at the time of writing).
Today, it hosts almost 2 million merchants and is the shop builder for online business owners.
Shopify’s blog is incredibly helpful to anyone starting an ecommerce business. The blog covers pretty much every topic on starting an online shop. And blog posts include so much detail that you can learn enough about selling physical products online to start your own store.
Next steps
Are you ready to start blogging for business?
The 4-Step Automatic Attraction System
for attracting more clients daily... without paid ads, social media, or "hustle"!
If so, I’d love to see you at my masterclass.
This free program will cover how to use a 4-step system to automatically generate leads and clients from your blog. (It’s the exact system I’ve used to build my blog.)
Learn more:
