5 Tips for Starting a Blog

A blog is a brilliant way to promote a business. Whatever your product or service, running a blog alongside the business is hugely beneficial.

Run a restaurant? Blog about food and recipes. Sell football boots? Blog about football. Work as an accountant? Blog about the new tax laws.

A blog allows you to build credibility and trust with customers. If your blog is really good you might even build a connection with them: I define this as a sharing of values and beliefs.

The London School of Attraction currently has 15,000 readers a month and we gain hundreds of new visitors every day. Here are our five tips for building a blog:

1. Learn the basics of “SEO”. SEO (search engine optimisation) is the new snake oil, with thousands of companies from Detroit to Dhaka all claiming to be experts.  Some of them have some good advice, but most are terrible.

To get your site listed well on google, all you really need are two things: well-written, relevant content and links to your site from respected sources. Take a look at http://www.seobook.com/blog for some useful tips.

2. Look at other good blogs. Find a couple of great blogs and have a good think about what they do well. Look at their article titles, their content and the way they make their money. Take the best bits from lots of different blogs.

Here are a few blogs that I read every day that do a lot right:

www.zonalmarking.net

www.stevepavlina.com

www.grantland.com

www.zenhabits.net

You can get a rough idea of a blog’s readership by checking www.alexa.com.

3. Write great content. The real acid test of a blog is repeat visitors. If you can keep your readers coming back, you can build a great following really quickly.

If you struggle to get repeat visitors, you’ll struggle to grow. So make sure you write interesting content to get people coming back. It’s not just about getting high up the search engines; it’s about maximising the value of visitors your SEO strategy provides.

4. Market your blog. There are millions of blogs out there vying for attention. To get people on to your blog you need to get the word out, and guest posting (as I’m doing on this blog) is a useful way to get exposure to a brand new audience. The link back to your site will also help with your SEO.

(An alternative to guest posting is to submit your article to a “blog carnival”, which is like the blog equivalent of an open mic night.)

There are loads of ways to market your blog. The most important thing is the mindset of actively promoting your blog, rather than just sitting back waiting for people to read it.

5. Have a call to action. Once you start getting traffic, make sure you know what to do with it. Get readers onto a mailing list? Sell some products? Arrange a meeting?

With our blog we have two goals. Our primary conversation is to sell a coaching course. Our secondary conversion is to get the reader onto out mailing list.

Think carefully about the purpose of your own blog and how you realise that purpose. People are getting wise to tired old internet marketing techniques, so do your best to be innovative

About the author

The London School of Attraction Ltd - www.lsattraction.com

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