When it comes to growing your brand online and generating new leads for your business, a blog is easily one of your business’ most powerful assets. But for most businesses, it’s easily their most under-utilized assets. Top minds like Danny Iny and Ash Ambirge have built seven-figure businesses with a blog as their primary marketing tool, and every year, more and more smart business owners catch on to the magic of blog marketing.
Ambirge found sudden Internet fame in 2011 with her ’97 in 11′ course, where she showed participants week-by-week how to generate $97,000 in revenue in one year using nothing more than a blog as a marketing tool. So how can you capture new leads, get your brand out there, and boost sales with nothing more than a blog? Here are three quick tips to get you started.
Smart SEO: Find Trending Keywords & Guide Your Topics With Them
Black hat SEO tactics are no longer as effective as they once were, but for businesses that want to scale all the way to the top of Google Mountain, a regularly updated blog with strong keywords is still the way to go. The mistake that most businesses make, though, is that they focus on keywords they want associated with their brand instead of the keywords people are actively looking for. If you want to expand your audience with a great SEO campaign, you need to know what keywords they are searching for and then write your blog posts around them.
Tools like Google Trends and TweetStats will show you popular topics and search terms, while social websites like BuzzFeed (which is one of the most-shared websites in the world) can show you what kind of content gets shared most often.
Guest Posts: Reaching Out To New Audiences
Having a dedicated audience is critical to blog marketing success. You can’t convert readers that you don’t have, and unless your website ranks within the first three or four results on Google for popular search terms, you’ll need to use other tactics to find new audiences. A guest posting campaign is a powerful strategy that can help you find hundreds or even thousands of new readers.
Canadian Internet marketer Danny Iny’s first business – an educational software company – failed, leaving him with over $250,000 in debt. That’s when he kickstarted his second business – Firepole Marketing – with dozens of guest posts on popular blogs, earning himself the nickname “the Freddy Krueger of blogging” in the process (“wherever I turn, you’re there!”). Now, Firepole Marketing employs 18 people and does 7 figures in annual revenue – thanks to the magic of guest posting.
Great Writing Is Critical For Strong Returns
Of course, you could be blogging and using keywords like nobody’s business, but if the quality of your writing isn’t up to par, you’ll have difficulty standing out from other businesses. Internet marketer Ash Ambirge, founder of House of Moxie Creative, has found massive success (she build her first 7-figure brand before she turned 30) by standing out from the crowd and writing in her own unique, irreverent, and often vulgar style. Even if you’re not as comfortable with cuss words as Ambirge, her work is a prime example of how having a strong voice and great command of storytelling can build an audience.
Having a well-written blog isn’t just a nice little side activity. For modern brands, it’s the key to expanding their reach and boosting their revenue. With great writing, an up-to-date blog, and a vigorous guest posting schedule, you can expand your reach and find new audiences you wouldn’t have otherwise found.