Today nearly everyone has a blog. Blogging has become as ubiquitous as email, but it was not always that way.
The Evolution of Blogging
Blogging began in the 1990s as personal online diaries. Brave souls poured their hearts out publicly, detailing their days, struggles, and triumphs. Originally called weblogs, these journals might contain stories, recollections, photos, or poetry. As time passed and technology developed, vlogs, or video weblogs, appeared on sites like YouTube.
While the days of Homestead, Blogger, Tripod, and GeoCities have long passed, some early sites still host blogs. Live Journal continues to host blogs, although many people now prefer sites like WordPress. The latter easily converts from a personal journal to a business website, if needed.
The content of blogs also changed radically. Once the purview of personal anecdotes and recounts of one’s day, blogging evolved into a marketing strategy enabling businesses to provide added value to consumers by expounding on the pain points solved by their product. Blogs also became a way for companies to expound on their family of products and how they could solve other problems faced by consumers.
Business blogs consist of short-form and long-form content with photos and videos integrated. Typical lengths exist for text articles, with 300-, 500-, and 1,000-word blogs forming the three most common word lengths. Blog content the same word length as magazine feature articles also permeates blogs today. The word length of these articles ranges from 1,700 to 3,500 words.
Boost your Marketing Strategy with Blogging
A company or product blog now comprises one of the top ingredients in a successful marketing plan. It ranks with advertisements and press releases as an integral portion of the marketing plan.
This diverse marketing tool can work in tandem with any marketing strategy or campaign. It provides a manner of direct consumer communication like social media that lets your company communicate with their target audience as well as allowing customers to communicate directly with it. The feedback provided by direct communication enables companies to effect constant product and service improvements based on consumer demand.
They can also reframe advertising messages based upon consumer feedback, which lets them know when they missed a problem that their product solves. Consumers can let the company know the many ways in which they use a product, which can help the business improve or contribute to the development of new products.
One blog can contain many topics. A company can post press releases to blogs as well as information on product introductions and improvements. Blogs help to:
- Educate
- Inform
- Entertain
By now, blogging probably sounds pretty awesome, and you probably want to host a blog for your business. You should, but you should contact Bake More Pies to plan and implement it! While blogs provide as much fun for those writing them as for those reading them, it does take a bit of expert knowledge to create a successful blog. Establishing one requires many steps and decisions.
Blog Topics or Article Themes
You must decide if you want to focus your blog on a specific product or on your business as a whole. Do you want to create a blog focused on solving pain points with products or something that entertains as a promotional vehicle? While you can change this later, you could confuse readers or remove topics they enjoyed. Making a decision, then sticking with it makes the best choice.
Blog Host Service or Website Integrated
Smaller companies may use WordPress to power their blogs, while large corporations typically integrate a blog into their existing website. Either way, you need the blog to match the design of the rest of the website. Which method you choose to create the blog really determines how you host it. Many people on WordPress choose hosting on the site’s servers, especially solopreneurs and small businesses. Larger corporations typically own their servers and internally host their websites, thus allowing them to integrate the blog into their existing structure. WordPress allows the blog administrator to add webpages to the blog, so many small businesses use it as their website host. Once you pin down which hosting option you will use, you need to choose the design theme of the blog. WordPress makes this a point and quick undertaking. Your website designer needs to design the blog page, though, if you own a business with an existing website.
Content and Copywriting
Now you on to brainstorming the blog content. This process involves creating a list of the article topics you want to cover. You need copywriting skills, or you need to hire a copywriter.
Consider this, though, if you do have skills in writing copy. Despite the skill set, do you have the time? Could you put in the time it takes to write a blog each day on top of running your business? Corporation C-level employees might think they have a vast selection of employees they could tap for writing, but technical writing and business writing contrast vastly with blogging. Bloggers also have to know search engine optimization (SEO) and local SEO.
SEO Page Optimization
Each blog you publish needs SEO page optimization. That includes working appropriate keyword phrases into the alt text, meta description, blog content, and title tag of each blog. These page optimization items comprise an integral part of the article copywriting that goes into each blog. That might sound odd since each blog will have a different topic. Your blog uses three to five keyword phrases in each article. At least one would provide the keyword, used in every blog, which represents the overall theme of the blog. This keyword also appears in the title tag, graphic and video alt text, and the meta description.
These keywords provide the main topic ideas of the text. When a search engine crawls your website, each proper use of these helps your site to rank in the search results. These must be on point and accurately represent the article text and topic. Both Bing and Google dock the score of webpages that stuff a blog with keywords or that use out of place phrases.
Besides SEO, you also need each blog to include local SEO. That refers to the practice of including the city and state location of the business with at least one of the key phrases, typically a long-tailed key phrase.
Talk With Us
Before you gasp at how complex and complicated blogging sounds, call Bake More Pies. We can take your blog from idea to fruition. Our staff works with you to determine the best host, design, theme, article topics, article ideas, graphics, and videos for your blogs plus, we have the experienced staff to write the SEO copy, design the blog and publish it all for you! Since we also write ads, scripts, and shoot videos, we can handle all of the production for you. We think we just heard a “whew” from the readers. You can easily create a successful blog or vblog. Let Bake More Pies help – call us today!
