Learn about the importance of running a blog to increase your business’ website traffic and how to start one effectively.

Hi, my name is Linda Fanaras and I’m the president of Millennium Agency.

I’m here to talk to you today about blogs. So, blogging is a topic that has become more and more popular over the last several years. And one of the reasons that is, is it helps your website be found. Often companies feel as though if I write an article on widgets for example and I post that on my blog people will start running to my website and I will get all these leads. It doesn’t exactly work that way.

So, what you would like to do during this blog strategy process is to take a look at your company. What do you have to offer? How can you educate the market in a way that makes you an opinion leader in your space?

So, if you sell widgets for the automotive industry and they’re very unique you may want to write articles around that topic, not necessarily about your product or how great it is, but maybe how the industry is changing regarding widgets in the automotive industry and what’s trending. So, the way to go about this is, the first step is to do your keyword research. You really want to find out what people are searching for in your industry.

Once you establish the keywords, it will help you devise a plan for writing your blog. So, for example if we found out that widgets in the automotive industry help save lives what we would do is start to build out this blog content around the keywords that we’ve actually been able to run. So, if you are able to take a look at some of the tools that Google has to use you can go on to their platform and find out what the necessary keywords would be for writing a blog regarding this topic.

And once you are actually able to do that and determine what that is, you can start to build out this blog in a very systematic way. So, if you’ve ever written articles before you’ll want to have a good introduction. You’ll want to make sure the middle of the article is academic and educational and then you’ll want to close the article with a conclusion and summarize everything. Within the article you also may want to link to areas of interest where you can prove what you’re saying.

Maybe you’ll include one or two links to some key articles possibly there’s one in Widget News or Newsweek and that support your article, that also helps you build credibility within your blog.

Once you’ve done that, blogs can range anywhere from three hundred words to eight hundred to twelve hundred words. We like to see them anywhere from six to twelve hundred words. And often it’s much more effective if you can write a blog that’s educational, that has photos, that has engaging content, because you don’t want people to come to your blog and be completely bored and leave. So, the idea here is really to write a blog that is powerful, that’s interesting, that’s engaging, that keeps them on your website, so they keep coming back for more and use your website as a resource.

What we have found over the years with our customers is that if they write blogs in the most effective way, their prospective customers will come back to their website, read a blog, and then turn around, and actually fill out a contact form or make a phone call. So, this is the type of lead generation strategy you could put into place by writing blogs.

We like to see our clients write blogs once a month, all the way up to four times a month. We do a lot of blog writing for our clients. We are very specific as far as how we go about writing the blogs and what the most effective way is and how to track the success of those blogs over time. It’s not an overnight solution. It’s something that you have to invest in, and believe in, and continue to do over a period of time in order for it to be successful for your website. So, blogging today with some of the algorithms that Google has in place can be an extraordinarily successful way to help you generate inbound traffic.

It’s one of the strategies that we recommend as part of this process and we would definitely recommend it for you as well. So, I guess in summary what I would like to say here today is. You know if you’re thinking about writing a blog or if you’re thinking about engaging with a company to write a blog there are a couple steps that you need to keep in mind.

Number one, find out what your trending topics are. Number two, do your keyword research. Number three write engaging, clear, and concise content or work with an agency that can help you do that. Number four, post and post your blogs on a consistent and ongoing basis and over time this will help you accelerate lead generation and ideally sales in your company.

So, thank you today for joining me in this podcast regarding blogging. I hope it’s helped you consider blogging for the future and I wish you all the best.

Thank you.