You’ve probably found yourself spending more time online lately. Since you are searching, working, or socializing more than usual, you may have noticed a lot of buzz about blogging. Blogs are not new they got their start in the late 90s. They started out more as an online journal. But over the last few years, they’ve evolved into an integral part of businesses both small and large. It may surprise you to learn that blogging can provide numerous benefits for your business. Here are six reasons why it’s important to maintain a business blog.
Quality Content Helps Drive Traffic to Your Site
Ultimately, your blog posts will need to provide your audience with value-rich content. Most business websites use blogs as a way to drive more traffic to their sites. Blogging is an ideal way to increase your search ranking. There are basically two main ways a blog helps search engine optimization.
A business blog gets updated regularly. Every time a new blog is posted, it offers another opportunity to make your site more visible to your potential clients. Search engines tend to take notice of sites with fresh content. Well-optimized content can help your site appear in search engine results for a variety of search terms. This ultimately brings more visitors to your website and over time, gradually increases traffic.
Blogs can be beneficial for increasing your social media performance. When you have blog post content that adds value, is compelling and engaging, users tend to share it across social media outlets. As your content reaches a wider audience, your social media engagement and reach expand.
Blogs Can Keep Your Audience Updated About the Business
You as a business owner can think of blogging as a direct communication channel with your audience. It can be leveraged to keep customers and potential customers in the loop about your business. Your website content is more straightforward and practical. A business blog is more flexible and casual making it easier to connect with customers. You can share updates in such a way that it demonstrates who you are and not just what you do. It’s the perfect space to go into more depth about your products and services, comment on industry trends, and share timely content.
Get Valuable Feedback from Customers
A business website does a great job of presenting customers with the information they need. It’s only one-way communication. Customers don’t usually have room to ask questions, start a conversation, or comment. This is what gives a blog power. It can be designed to give your customers a voice. You can encourage feedback and discussion in the comment section of a blog. When you engage in great conversations with customers, you build trust, rapport, and authority for your brand. You also get to see your business from their point of view so you can make improvements where necessary.
Relay More Information About Your Products
Relevant content gives you the space to go into more in-depth explanations about your products or services. You have room to discuss how they are used and their advantages. You can share reviews, provide case studies, explore some of the specific benefits, or provide “how-to” guides with your target audience. This type of content helps to establish your company as an authority in the industry. This builds a knowledge bank; it also helps breed creativity and innovation. When you provide readers with deeper, more complex information on your posts, you are more likely to generate more ideas.
Quality Content Are Useful For Generating Leads
Search engines index blogs separate from the rest of your site. This provides a great opportunity for it to generate leads if you add a CTA or “call to action” to each post. This can be as simple as asking the reader to give you a call or schedule an appointment. It can also be an offer such as a free eBook, template, free trial, or some other type of content that visitors are willing to trade their information to receive. It’s not difficult to develop a CTA and involves just a few steps.
Create a piece of valuable content your visitors are like to exchange their information for.
Offer the free content and call-to-action by adding a popup or banner in your post.
Set up a landing page to send people who click the call-to-action. This is the page you will use to capture their information.
Once a visitor provides their information (email or phone number), they get access to the promised content.
The term branding doesn’t just mean your logo and slogan. Branding is now used to refer to how customers and potential customers respond psychologically and emotionally to your brand. Your blog should be a reflection of your brand and it should incorporate the same slogan, color scheme, and motifs as your brand and your website. You’ll want to continue solidifying your branding that you’ve used on your website and social media platforms. This helps keep your brand consistent. Maintaining a blog helps build your brand identity as it becomes an extension of your brand on a level customers can easily engage.
Final Thoughts
These are just six great reasons why consistent blogging is important to your online presence. As a matter of fact, blogging as a business entity hasn’t ever been more important than it is right now. Your business could experience more leads, more site traffic, well-established industry authority, and a better relationship with your customers. If you haven’t been blogging, then now is a great time to start. If you have been blogging there’s never a better time than now to make the most of it to increase your online visibility. Developing an effective blogging strategy can be just the boost your business needs!
We launched a new website for a personal trainer a couple of months prior. She is inspirational and great to educate her clientele about nutrition, exercises, and sharing recipes. After a couple of blog posts were published she wanted to see if she could communicate with the readers via comments. I could truly understand that she wanted to have some feedback from the community and help others in case they have questions.
I normally don’t allow comments on blogs, because 95% is spam and it just takes too much time to manage. But I wanted to prove my point so we let readers leave comments for 2 months. Over 2 month period, 45 comments were left. It would be a success if these were genuine and real.
But none of them was. Very disappointing, right?
What is spam comments and how to identify them
But why people leave spam comments
The whole reason why spammers leave spam comments on blogs is to link back to their own websites, so they can rank higher in the search results and get more traffic. Basically, people that are shamelessly and shadily promoting their websites.
Which one is real and which one is spam?
With our society being as reliant on technology as it is, encountering spam comments is increasingly inevitable. And if your website gains traction and becomes popular, the chances of receiving spam comments increases, too. But the good news is that you can avoid any spam interference in your business by learning:
Different types of WordPress comments
Why spam comments are bad
How to identify spam comments
How to reduce the number of spam comments you receive
Let’s break these down to give you a better idea of how to avoid scams, limit spam comments and messages, and why these things are important.
Comments vs. Pings on WordPress
If you use WordPress to run your business’s website or blog, you’ll want to know the difference between these two important communication types. Pings are further broken down into pinbacks and trackbacks. The primary difference between the two is that pingbacks are automatic and trackbacks are manual.
Pingbacks are the automatically generated comments that appear when other bloggers link to one of your posts, or you link from one of your posts to another on your website. Trackbacks are generated by the blogger as a way to let you know that they linked to your content. These two types of pings are easy to identify and separate from comments because they contain the following:
The title of the post that was linked to
The link to that post
An excerpt from the blog post that the ping came from
Alternatively, a comment will contain:
The name of the person who wrote it
Their email address
A website URL if they enter one
Their IP address
Their comment
Why Spam Comments are Bad
Because spam comments are annoying and often time-consuming to go through and remove, many people end up just leaving them up. This can be dangerous. Spending a little bit of time monitoring spam comments can help save you a lot of trouble later. For one thing, Google might notice if your website starts racking up bad links and spam comments.
Google is concerned with the safety and security of the websites it hosts. If you let your website fill up with bad links and overflow with bot and spam comments, this essentially tells Google and your customers or readers that you’re just not that concerned with the quality of content on your website. While you weren’t the one to post them, a lack of moderation can come across as lazy or indifferent.
Think of it this way: you’re interested in purchasing a home, and today you’re visiting two identical homes that offer the same things. They’re the same size, the same number of rooms and bathrooms, same setup, same price, and they’re right next to each other, so the location is the same, too. But when you pull up, one lawn is scattered with overturned garbage cans, and trash is spilling out across the grass.
The current owners didn’t make the mess, so they decided to leave it there. When you turn and see that the other home’s lawn is pristine, that’s likely to be the one you’ll choose. First impressions are important. A website riddled with spam (virtual trash, for the sake of this example) can affect the level of trust you receive from your customers or readers and the authority you have in your market.
How to Identify them
Generally, anything in the online world that looks suspicious is something that you should approach cautiously. Here are a few foolproof ways to identify spam comments:
The author’s name looks fake
The email address doesn’t look legitimate (usually because it’s a random collection of letters and numbers)
The URL is suspicious
Their comments are generic, apply to any post or topic, or they’re unrelated to your business
Fake Names
If a comment meets any of these three criteria, it’s probably spam. Now, it can be difficult to tell if a person’s name looks real or fake because some are just more common than others. What you’re really looking for with the author’s name is the use of keywords instead of a real name like John or Kate. Using keywords like “personal training tips” as a name instead of a real name is a sure sign of a spam comment.
Suspicious emails
Suspicious email addresses are one of the most common indicators of spam messages. For example, if you receive an email with a subject line that tells you that your Apple account has been locked, but the email address is seemingly strange or contains random characters like this: [email protected], this is clearly not from a trustworthy source. You should also make sure that the email address aligns with the name that they used. If the name is Mary, but the email address says Nancy, that’s a red flag. If it’s close and you’re unsure, you can always use this website to confirm if an email really exists or not.
Strange website URLs
Another indicator is dodgy website URLs. Does their website look real, active, and interactive? Or does it contain strange links, zero comments, and seemingly random topics that don’t align with their comment or email address? If their website reads like clickbait, it probably is. If it looks like a spam shopping site, it’s mostly blank, or it’s otherwise suspicious, it’s questionable, and it’s acceptable to mark it as spam and move on. When in doubt, don’t respond to comments, give out personal information, open any attachments, or click on any links until you have comfortably confirmed their authenticity.
And it’s also important not to automatically click on every URL you’re sent to confirm if it’s a legitimate website. This can infect your computer with malware and lead to various other problems. The better way to investigate URLs is to install the WordPress filter, Askimet. Some versions come with it built-in already. Askimet allows you to hover over a URL and see a preview of the website. This way, you don’t always have to click on it to confirm its validity.
Generic comments
Spam comments are generally automatic ones made by bots. For this reason, it’s nearly impossible for them to be specific. Generic comments like “great read! Wow, thanks!” are usually spam. Comments that are relevant to the topic that you posted on, reference a specific piece of the article, or quote something from the article are more likely to be real and trustworthy. You’ll also want to look out for comments riddled with grammatical errors, improper use of language, and misspellings of common words. These are other signs that your generic comment is a spam comment.
How to Reduce Spam Comments
Reducing the number of spam comments that you receive comes down to two things: trusting your instincts and installing anti-spam plugins. I can help you with both of these tasks. Askimet and other anti-spam plugins do a great job filtering spam messages out as they come in. But that doesn’t mean that some won’t get through the filter on occasion. Even after we install the filters, you’ll still want to monitor the site (or allow me to do so for you with my quality step-by-step support for your website) and stay on top of it. Schedule a free 20-minute phone call so we can go over your options for creating your website or making your existing website better.
Some people firmly believe that a Google Business listing is all you need. Others think that your success will be determined solely by your website. So, which one is it? The truth is, each of these marketing tools is valuable. They can each help you generate client leads, meet your revenue goals, attract new customers, or keep existing customers engaged, even while you’re sleeping. But while building and maintaining a website isn’t necessary for everyone, establishing your Google Business listing is.
This free
listing can act as a 24/7 marketing tool. It can help you establish
credibility, attract attention, provide important business information, and
offer social proof through reviews, all without a website. Still, many are
hesitant about adding a Google Business Listing to their online presence. Let’s
talk about why how this mindset can be hurting your business:
Why is GMB listing important?
When it comes to GMB / how it is called in the SEO world/, your question may be, “why?” But the better question is: “why not?” Google business accounts are easy to set up and free. How many other marketing tools are truly this easy and effective? With a GMB listing, your business can rank on local searches without having a website to link back to.
You can provide new and existing customers with all of the information they need right here. As far as basic information goes, your listing should make it easy to find:
Your phone number
Your email address
Your business address
A breakdown and description of your services and products
Prices for your services and products (optional)
Relevant images and logos
Whatever else your target audience will find valuable
The easier you make it for customers to find you and important information related to your business, the easier you make it for customers to choose you over others offering the same products and services. With a Google Business Listing, all of your information is stored right there on the Google server. You don’t have to worry about paying for or maintaining a website, optimizing multiple pages, or tracking its performance. Of course, having a website can also help you achieve your goals. But again, it isn’t always necessary.
How you can use online reviews to your advantage
Many businesses use online reviews as social proof or evidence that they’re offering a product or service that exceeds their customers’ standards. Local opinion is important when you’re choosing a service. Online marketing studies in 2019 revealed that online reviews influenced purchase decisions for 93% of consumers. Further, 97% of respondents answered that they read reviews for local businesses. With numbers this high, you may be missing out on important opportunities if you’re not highlighting your reviews and making them easy to find.
Online reviews not only generate social proof, but they also increase trust and give you a direct line to potential customers. Many business owners, especially new ones, are afraid of getting bad reviews. But I have a little secret for you: the occasional bad review won’t destroy your reputation. Even the most successful businesses get a bad review from time to time. If you get a negative review, you can balance it out with new 5-star reviews. Luckily, there are two easy ways to do this:
Educate your new and existing customers on the importance of completing online reviews.
Many people will only leave reviews when they are very upset about the way something turned out. If your customers are generally happy with your products or services, they may not feel compelled to share that each time they come back for more. But that evidence of having repeat, loyal customers is crucial. Politely let your customers know how much a positive online review means to your business. If you’re worried that they still won’t take the time, offer an incentive. A coupon code, free sample, or other type of discount works wonders for rewarding company loyalty and initiating a positive online review.
Provide excellent customer service.
Businesses that go above and beyond are the ones that don’t have to try as hard to convince customers to leave positive reviews. If you’re providing excellent customer service and a top-notch overall experience, your customers will be happy to help. They’ll also be much more likely to take the initiative and leave a positive review on their own, making less work for you.
Local posts are similar to FB posts
GMB listings have become so popular in recent years that they are essentially acting as bonus social media platforms. Right on your listing, you can:
Promote
important events and updates
Promote
new or existing products and services
Bring
attention to any discounts or loyalty programs you offer
Boost
your website traffic (if you have one)
Boost
traffic to your business’s social media pages
Quickly
and easily book appointments
Add
a “call now,” button that makes it easier for your customers to contact you
Add
a “buy now,” link that takes all of the hassle out of the purchase for your
customer
Offer
specials with start and end dates that are easy to find
At Turek Design, we make it easy for you to get your information out there. It’s time to take advantage of this incredible marketing tool. We will help you create and optimize your business listing for outstanding results. Your listing can help you manage your online presence, provide social proof of your excellent customer service, attract attention, retain customers, find new ones, increase your revenue, and so much more. Why wait another day to get the word out about your business? Schedule a free discovery calltoday to see how we can help.
Do you quickly want to edit an image for your business blog post, but you do not have any app or software to do it. Don’t worry. WP has a tool that lot of people don’t know about. There is not a lot you can do with it, but sometimes that is enough. It can:
Crop images
Scale image size down
Rotate images
Flip images horizontaly or vertically
Most people need the scaling feature, so the images are not huge and download slow, but cropped or scaled to the correct size and download fast.
Edit an image in WP is simple
Let’s take a look at how to properly scale an image in WordPress.
3. Give Your Image a Title
Step by step process of image editing
Add the image to the Media Library.
After added, click to the Eidt Media button at the bottom of the image.
Top editing icons from left to right: Crop, Rotate right, Rotate Left, Flip vertically, Flip horizontally, Undo and Redo.
Image scaling is done with changing the image size in the Dimension area at the right sitebar.
You need to make a selection on the image before the crop icon shows up.
Crop or scale first before inserting the image into the blog post. If you do it after it was inserted into the post, and change the image later, it might not show up correctly.
The image editing tool in WP does not allow drawing or adding text to an image. It is really just very basic.
Most future business owners know that they need a website to show that they exist. So they hire a local web designer to build an awesome looking site. A good web designer will have a discovery period when they ask a lot of questions about target customers, current marketing materials.
After a couple of weeks, the website is finished. Done. It looks awesome.
They paid about $5,000 for it, and wait a couple of month to see result. But there is no result. Nobody find and visit the website. So it doesn’t bring in any sales.
So why did the website fail?
There are many small parts needed to build a successful local business. Things like recognizing what clients actually want, how to talk to them, how much to charge, what to sell, and how to sell it in a way that the client wants. And let’s not forget that you also need to figure out where the potential clients are, how to find them, how to present the service, or product to them.
All of these require time and commitment to find out.
These are not things that a website designer can figure out on their own. They do their best to create you an effective website, but you already need a deep understanding of your customers to help develop a website which will really boost and elevate your business.
Once I had a client who knew she needed a website for her business, but when we had the discovery session, she could not tell me how she was going make money off of her site. It was a great idea but was not developed completely, so I referred her to a business coach first, before starting on the website project.
How can you build a website without experience?
There are many different easy to do, DIY website builders out there, some of which you might have heard about already.
I have experience with a couple of them, but not all. Website builders are great for small business owners just starting up and have no budget to hire a website designer for a real custom website. The website templates are nicely designed and can be customized to specific businesses with the addition of images and text.
Even when you’re just starting out, you need a great looking website, otherwise you lose customers. People judge the website and make an assumption of the business based on what they see. So a good looking website is a must but is does not have to cost an arm and a leg.
If you are a little techy and willing to learn, there are plenty of tutorials on YouTube how to work with these templates.
What do you need before building a website?
Instead of focusing your energy on the website, focus on more critical tasks:
Get to know your potential customers to understand what problem they really need solved (it might be very different what you thought of before)
Listen what they are really saying and not what you want to hear
Develop your service offer based upon this information
Start promoting your service which will teach you how to communicate with your market, how to convince them to use your product, and so on
Start making money by running your business
A good website works only if your business works.
I am not saying that you do not need web designer, you will later, when you know your business and customers and when you can allocate a budget for a real custom website.
Did you know that you can optimize your images for SEO? That means you can use your images to help improve your search engine ranking. Unfortunately, small business owners, who update they website regularly with blog or new content aren’t aware of this and are missing out on getting free traffic from Google.
So what exactly is website SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of optimizing your content so that you get organic traffic to your blog from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
I know SEO is confusing. It covers so many different steps that most people do not understand.
The tips I’m sharing with you today are extremely easy to implement.
1. Change your file name
I know that it is easy just to upload your pictures from your phone with the name like “20180310_143742.jpg”, or if you buy images from stock websites, like Depositphotos.com, “Depositphotos_156590_original.jpg”. But it does not help Google at all to know anything about the image on your website. The images on your site talk about the content of the site as well. When saving your image to your computer, give it a descriptive file name.
2. Give Your Images Alt Text (Alternative Text)
If you upload a picture of a green backyard to your blog, it’s clear to you and your readers that the image is a backyard.
However, search engines can’t actually see your images, so they use your alternative text (alt text) to determine what the image is about.
To edit your images alt text, in your media library in WordPress (Media > Library), click on your image, and place a short description of the image in the “alt text” box.
3. Give Your Image a Title
Never keep the images default title (such as 20180310_143742) when uploading images to your website. If you saved your image with a descriptive file name, you can use that as Title.
For example, if saving an image of “children_at_backyard.jpg”, you can name the image “children_at_backyard”.
To name your image title in WordPress, go to your media library (Media > Library), click on the image, and insert your title in the title box.
4. Pay Attention to Image Size
Your website load time also contributes to your SEO ranking. Keep your blog speed up by re-sizing your images. WordPress has a couple of option to resize your images.
You can upload to your site and in the Media Library click on the Edit image button and use the side options to scale your image to a web-friendly site. 2000px width is OK for a heard image, but if your image is just part of a page and take only the half of a website width, keep it around 700px.
You can also crop and flip images in WP, and cropping can also help to reduce the size issue. There are also Plugins to resize your images.
At the end, or maybe at the beginning check out how fast your website download and where Google Speed Test find some issue.
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