Below, you can find a few ways to start a blog for your business and why it will bring value if done right.

Benefits of starting a blog for your business

From a marketing and growth perspective, starting a blog comes with multiple benefits:

SEO

While we will not run into the specifics of SEO in this guide, this is one of the top reasons why businesses are starting blogs. They deliver informatively content, answer pain points, share relevant industry news and more.

But writing content like the one mentioned in the previous sentence comes with another tremendous benefit if done right: ranking high in Google Search leads to more awareness and eventually conversions.

According to many marketers, SEO is still one of the best tactics in your growth strategy.

But, SEO has its downsides too:

The most significant benefit of this channel is its affordability. Write excellent content with the right keywords and convert users at a fraction of the cost of other digital channels.

We know businesses that rely solely on SEO to grow, and they do fantastic in terms of revenue.

Awareness and Brand Trust

We discussed how to build awareness in this guide.

One of the methods to build awareness is to create engaging and helpful blog posts for your audience. Then, with SEO, bring the blog posts in front of the right eyes.

While you're still building the awareness, people will slowly transition to the consideration phase, when after they read a few blog posts from you and skimmed through your website, they will begin to consider your products.

The content you write on your blog can be of multiple forms: informative, personal opinions, how-to and more. Writing constantly will establish your brand as an expert who knows what they are doing and what they are talking about; therefore, who can be trusted.

The Brand Trust factor plays a huge role in determining if a person will buy your product or not, eventually. With a blog, you have the power to influence this and slowly build a relationship with your customer base.

Capture potential leads

Having a fantastic blog with the right type of SEO will lead to more traffic to your website, which sooner or later will lead to more conversions.

Here's an idea:

Run ads on Facebook with your blog posts for as little as £1 per day and retarget the people who read your posts with ads. The people who read your posts are warmed up already; they're in the awareness stage.

Retargeting them with ads is a smart way to catch them just at the right time: when they need your product.

Grow your skill base

Writing is a valuable skill to have. While we're not going into the actual benefits, delivering this type of content and knowing your way around SEO might pay dividends in the future.

Plus, it's fun.

How to start a blog

Most likely, you are in a situation where you already have an existing website, and you would like to add a blog to it. This depends on a few things:

What if you build a new website and integrate the blog?

Writing Blog Posts

Assuming your blog is ready, let's move to the next section of the mini-guide.

Whenever we write blog posts on you're Cat, we follow this set of rules:

Pick the topics you want to write about

Your blog will mainly focus on your business, so the topics will be related to your products or services.

Ask yourself this:

Or, put yourself in the shoes of your potential customer:

For example, you are looking for a skincare product.

As a customer, what questions (or concerns) do you have about this product, and you can answer them in a blog post?

A few ideas

Now, these are just a few ideas, but you roughly understand what we mean here.

This is an essential, ongoing part of the process. You need to brainstorm ideas constantly and then turn them into blog posts.

We suggest keeping a Google Doc or an Excel sheet where you write down all your ideas; it does not matter if you think they are good or bad; for now, write them down.

Label each one with “Published”, “Draft”, add the publish date or whatever label works for you to keep it smooth and organized.

This process involves quite a bit of creativity and reflection, so take the necessary time.

Write a summary

The blog is up and running, and you picked the first topic you want to write about.

What is the title and the key points I would like to write about on this topic?

These key points will likely become separate sections with header and subheader, so take some time to figure out how will you split this topic to make sense. This is quite important.

Another way to think about your blog post is the essay format. Just like an essay, your blog post will have an intro, body sections, and a conclusion. However, depending on the blog post, sometimes you might end up with a CTA instead of a conclusion: let's say you talk about the benefits of a specific product, and you want to encourage readers to check it in your store.

Take the time to figure out how will you format the blog post.

Start with a hook - keep readers interested to the end

This is important. This is the section where you hook the reader, and you promise him that if he keeps reading to the end, his curiosity will be satisfied, he will receive the answer he is looking for.

Here are a few ways you can hook your readers:

Use a solid CTA (click to action)

Examples:

The CTA will be included in the last part of the blog post, the so-called “conclusion.”

Edit and proofread

Some other things might put off your readers:

Tools like Grammarly can help with the first two points here. Sign-up for an account, and they will correct grammar errors and help you rephrase sentences and ideas.

Another piece of advice is to keep the text concise, avoid excessive wording, unnecessary ideas and phrases and stick to the main talking points of the text.

Make it SEO friendly

We're not going into the specifics of SEO in this text, but there are a few simple rules we can keep in mind and implement.

Search Engine Optimization is defined as a set of strategies used by marketers, businesses or website owners to increase their website visibility in searches.

The better the SEO is, the higher you will rank in searches, and more and more people will visit your website, increasing the chances of buying products from you.

A few simple SEO rules:

Notes

Writing excellent blog posts and ranking high in searches will take time, so the best time to start your blog is as soon as possible. The writing itself is only one side of the coin, it's a skill that takes a little bit of practice, but then there is the SEO aspect of blogging, which will take a little bit of time and effort to grasp.

SEO is a great strategy to build awareness and boost conversions, and compared with other channels; it's way less expensive. We know businesses that rely solely on SEO to grow their customer base and do great.

Keep your blog posts concise friendly (conversational), include keywords and images and start writing. You will adapt as you.