How To Use a Blog To Market Business (Definition and Steps)

Updated May 25, 2023

Image description

A man sits typing on a laptop next to a list entitled, "Best Business Blogging Practices" with these items:

• A captivating headline
• Include images
• Use your story when appropriate
• Be purposeful and consistent

Marketing a business requires an online presence. One of the ways to do this is by creating a blog. With a blog, your business can draw in more people to its website and demonstrate its expertise.

In this article, we discuss what a blog is, the difference between a blog and a webpage, and how to start an effective blog to market a business.

What is a blog?

A blog is a website where entries, known as blog posts, are presented in reverse chronological order. Blog posts are typically written articles that can cover any topic. As the owner of a blog, you would write posts on a topic and post them to your blog. These would then appear on the homepage, with the most recent one appearing first.

Blogs started off as personal online journals, but they have grown into a powerful marketing tool. Businesses can now use blogs to discuss their brand, share helpful information, promote products and much more. A blog can generate more traffic for your website and improve brand awareness and authority within your niche.

Difference between blogs and webpages

Blogs and webpages are similar, but there are a few key differences. While they are both forms of websites, they differ in how they are set up. On the front page of a blog, you will typically see the most recent blog post. Every time a new blog post gets added, it moves to the front page. This means that your blog website is always changing, based on how often you write new content.

A webpage, however, typically remains static. It is about one specific thing and it only changes if the owner decides to make edits. Webpages typically get grouped together with other webpages to form a website. For example, a website may have webpages such as "About Us," "Contact Us," "Products for Sale" and "Image Gallery."

Think of a blog like a newspaper, with new articles getting added every day. A webpage is more like information about the newspaper, such as when it was founded and how you can contact the organization.

How to start an effective blog

Follow these steps to start a blog as part of an effective marketing strategy:

1. Choose a location

Your blog needs to reside somewhere online. If your business already has a website, this is the most likely place that you'll want to put it. You can create a separate section on your website and store all of your blog posts there. Some choose to do this by putting their blog in a separate subsection, such as www.elmproducts.com/blog, while others put it on a separate sub-domain, such as www.blog.elmproducts.com. Where you choose to place yours depends on the current setup of your website, but there isn't much of a difference practically speaking.

The other option you have is to create a separate website for your blog. You may choose to do this for several reasons such as:

Your business does not currently have its own website.
You want to publish articles as a person, not under your company name.
You want to generate some backlinks to your website.

If you decide to go with this option, you will need to set up hosting, purchase a domain name and install a CMS, such as WordPress, to begin blogging.

2. Generate content ideas

Once your blog is set up, you need something to write about. You should take some time to generate a list of blog post ideas. Think about your target audience and the type of information that they might be seeking. Explore the blogs of some of your competitors and see what they have written about. Some common types of blog posts include:

Lists
How-tos
Interviews
Frequently asked questions
Guides
Product reviews

Your blog should contain a mix of these, based on your business. A key ingredient to an effective blog is regularly posting content. By brainstorming plenty of content ideas before you start posting, you can have a long list of ideas ready to go once you launch.

3. Start writing or hire a writer

When producing blog posts, it's important that you focus on quality over quantity. There is so much content online that your blog posts need to provide as much information as possible to stand out. Once you start writing, focus on producing the best blog posts you can rather than how many you can write. It's typically better to write one great blog post than five average ones.

If your business doesn't have a strong writer on the team or someone with enough time to focus on these posts, you should hire an outside writer. It's easy to find blog writers through freelancing websites who can craft high-quality blog posts on any topic. This may cost you more money, but you should look at it as an investment, as these blog posts will continue to serve your website for a long time.

Whether you hire an outside writer or write the posts yourself, there are a few key elements you'll want all your blog posts to have:

Links to outside, reputable sources
Short paragraphs of no more than a few sentences
Sections clearly defined by subject headers
A call to action
A catchy headline
Target keyword used throughout the post

4. Add in multimedia

After creating a draft of your post, you should add in some multimedia to your post. Multimedia includes things like video clips, GIFs or high-quality images related to your post. These multimedia items will prevent your blog post from being a solid wall of text, which can be challenging to read. A simple thing you can do is add one high-quality image to each written post. You can either add one of your own images or find a stock photo that fits the content. Just be sure to get either a free stock photo that gives you permission to use it, or you may need to purchase the stock photo.

5. Promote your posts

Writing a great post isn't enough if you want it to help your business. Once it's published, you need to do some promotion. Some simple ways to promote your new blog post are by sharing it on social media and by sending out a link to it to your email subscribers. It's also a good idea to learn some basic search engine optimization (SEO) practices so that your blog post has a better chance of appearing higher in search engines. If you wrote a high-quality post, this will hopefully lead to readers sharing it with their own social circles, thereby promoting itself going forward.

6. Analyze results

Every business has a different audience. After creating a few blog posts and receiving traffic to them, you should analyze how your blog posts are doing within your audience. Some things you'll want to examine are:

Which post readers are spending the most time on
Which post has the highest bounce rate (the percentage of viewers who leave your site from that page)
Which posts are getting shared the most often on social media
Which posts have resulted in the most product sales

Tracking information on your website is essential for learning this vital information. Once you have a large enough sample size, you can begin to see which strategies to focus on. For example, you may find that your article "10 Tips to Improve Website Security" produced great results, while "Our Interview With a Top Cyber Security Expert" did not. This might tell you that you should focus more on list-type articles and less on interviews.