A blog can either be used as the centre point of all a website’s marketing efforts and brand management or it can become a dusty waste ground for the occasional press release and price promotion announcement. With a little time and effort a blog can greatly enhance both your reputation and your SEO efforts, which in turn means more revenue. Here is how.
Why have a web hosting blog?
Become an authority on web hosting
Being seen to write about a subject matter with conviction will position you as an authority on web hosting, which in turn will convince people to trust you and make them much more likely to buy from you and recommend you to others.
Regular fresh content
The search engines love websites that have regularly updated content and those sites get an extra kick up the rankings. Because you can’t keep introducing new products all the time it can be difficult to keep adding new copy to your site. A blog helps to get around this problem.
Incoming links
If you are generating useful content it will eventually start picking up links from your readers which will help your Google Page Rank and SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings for your site in general.
Start a conversation
A good blog post will attract comments from your readers and shared on Twitter which means they are engaging with your brand and you can develop a relationship with them. Always reply to any comments left behind as this will encourage more of them.
Kill two birds with one stone
Customer newsletters when done well will increase brand engagement and revenue, when done badly they become spam. Use your blog’s content to populate your newsletters with useful information they actually want to read without having to duplicate your efforts and think of something new for the newsletter.
What to write about?
“How to” guides
Always very popular amongst readers, it is important you pitch the guides at the right level for your target audience. For example, if your customers are advanced webmasters don’t write a guide about how to use FTP and on the other side if your customers are beginners don’t write a guide about writing a PHP comment form from scratch.
Links to related resources
Lists are one of the bedrocks of many websites link building strategies and prove popular with readers e.g. “Top 10 WordPress plug-ins for advertisers” etc. They are also relatively quick and easy to write once you have your idea.
Your opinion on web hosting industry news
There is always plenty going on in the domain name and web hosting industry that doesn’t involve naming any other web hosts for you to report on. Readers are more likely to come back however if you add your own analysis and commentary on the news as well.
Competitions
People love getting something for free and if it’s a good prize word will soon spread amongst your community. A really strong prize early on can also help kick start your blog and draw interest from established sites.
Interviews
You’d be surprised how receptive people are to being interviewed, after all its free advertising for them! An interview with someone your customers can associate with and learn more about how they manage their website and industry experts with insider insights, tips and advice are popular.
What not to write about
Something that irritated you in your day to day life (e.g. late bus)
Adding a personal touch to your blog is great, recommended even, but tales of frustration from your day are not interesting to anyone but yourself. Keep it to yourself and your immediate social circle.
Business news and press releases (and nothing else)
Yes your blog is there to help you sell more at the end of the day but would you read another businesses press release and then come back for more? Neither will anyone else. Mix business news and updates with your user centric information and re-write the press releases to fit in with the tone of the blog rather than just copying and pasting it.
SEO spam content
As mentioned earlier a blog is a great way of adding new content to your site, but too many websites take advantage of this and use the blog purely for SEO purposes uploading content that makes little grammatical sense and is practically unreadable e.g. “Web hosting requires a lot of website hosting resources to ensure web hosting customers enjoy continued web hosting…”.
Filler
It can be hard to think of a couple of killer ideas a week and writers block hits the best of us but avoid the temptation to write content for the sake of it e.g. The successful blogs focus on quality over quantity with the ethos one great post a week people look forward to is better than 5 duds no one reads.
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