You've definitely heard about blogging, but it seems like a lot of work, doesn't it? What benefits will it bring and why work with us?
- To improve their domain ranking in Google - To raise their profile on social media - To deepen relationships with customers and clients - To help prospects trust them - To prove authority with their business networks
One thing I need to make clear is that when you work with Steffi Lewis Online, the default is that your blog runs on our servers and your website runs on your web designers server. You may think this causes a conflict of interest between the two, but the truth is that as long as they are both under the same domain name then Google treats them as one.
And they are designed to do very different things!"
Your website is your shop window and contains your products and services and information about who you are. It is designed to rank on Google and will hopefully be found during a search on page one.
Your blog, on the other hand, is what I consider your front door. It is designed to work more with social media and email, but at the same time, supports your website in Google's indexes. After all, your website won't change very often, will it? Your blog changes all the time ... and Google sees this.
Of course, you can share pages of your website onto social media, and your blog posts may rank in Google, but they each have their place and are designed to support building your brand awareness.
When you work with Steffi Lewis Online, our goal is to make things as easy as possible for you. One of my team will send you reminder emails 72 hours, 48 hours and 24 hours before you're due to publish to encourage you to get writing. By default, if we don't hear from you then we 'recycle' an existing blog post for that week because it's important to publish something regularly.
Our clients spend an average of just 20 minutes a week jotting down their raw thoughts!"
What we call 'raw thoughts' are just that. Don't worry about spelling or grammar, it's literally a brain dump on a particular subject you're an expert in. Open up a new email message, put a working title in the subject line then start typing. You'd be surprised how quickly you'll get it done, especially if you put an appointment in your diary to write at the same time every week.
If you're super busy, and may not have the time or the inclination to even jot down your raw thoughts, my team can write a 'generalist' blog posts for you.
If you respond to our reminder emails with something like, "Hey, can you write something about ..." then we will. If you can send a URL of a news article or other blog post on the subject, well, that will make our life a lot easier and allow us to focus in better in what you want us to write about.
This is usually an all or nothing proposition. Our clients either write all their blog posts, or we write them all for them. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground, but if a client wanted to write two a month and get us to do the other two, I'm sure we could accommodate that.
The morning before your publication day is when we create your blog post for you. Whether we've written the words or you have, a blog post needs many SEO tweaks and, of course, has to have perfect spelling and grammar throughout.
Once one of my creators has finished your blog post, they'll email you to let you know where to find it, and you can approve it and/or suggest changes. It also gets sent to our external checkers so we can all be sure that it's perfect in every way.
The three standard platforms we use are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn although we also share to a monthly Pinterest board. we reshare your blog post again early evening and feature you on that day's Steffi Show!
You will get plenty of human visitors to your blog posts and you can log in to your dashboard to track those visitors. If you've got a talented web designer, you can use your blog's RSS feed to get links to your latest blog posts to automatically appear on your website's homepage. Google will notice that too and boost your domain's search engine ranking because it sees your homepage changing each week as new blog posts are published.
So are there any downsides to blogging? No, but there are four possible objections we receive from potential new clients. I can give a positive answer to each one that usually makes them go "oh yeah, now I understand" and we get on with blogging for them.
These are:
- "My web designer says my blog needs to be internal to my website." My answer to that is "no, it needs to be internal to your domain". Google treats blog.yourdomain.com the same as www.yourdomain.com because they are both subdomains of yourdomain.com. It doesn't matter to Google that they are on different servers.
- "I don't know if I can write every week!" Ok then, we'll write it for you! Whether that's all of them or just some of them, no problem, we're pretty flexible like that, but usually, it's an all or nothing proposition.
- "I'm just a ... who is going to be interested in what I say?" Well, you're the expert on you, and you've had a fascinating career, haven't you? You'll be surprised about what you can write about that would be of interest to others.
- "£149 a month is a lot of money!" Is it? What's your hourly rate? I bet that it's a lot higher than what we charge per blog post, and we'll even give you the fifth blog post for free on a longer month. It could take you up to five hours a week to perfect a blog post on your own. How much would that cost you when it's all added up?
So there you go. Blogging is a simple way to get your brand, your knowledge and your words of wisdom out to your target audiences each and every week. It's a simple way to improve your domains SEO, a simple way to get heard over the background chatter of social media, and a simple way to build trust and prove authority.
We do all the work and you get all the glory! What's not to like about that?
If you're interested in blogging for your business, do call us on 0333 335 0420 or leave a comment below and let's see how we can help you.