Make sure to join us on December 17^th at 11am, PST for our webinar Creating a Business Blog. Register here.

Keeping up a regular blog for your business can be one of your most challenging, yet effective, marketing tools. The positives that come out of blogging for your business include improving SEO and ranking authority, providing content that attracts customers, engaging with current and past customers to keep them loyal, showing your expertise in your industry, and simply building a brand for you and your company. But keeping up with the rigorous schedule of continuously deciding on new content, writing compelling copy, distributing your blog on the web, and engaging with readers can leave a lot of business owners feeling overwhelmed.

Here are some tips and technologies to help you stay organized, come up with new content ideas, and more easily distribute your blogs.

Get organized

We’ve mentioned this before about blogging: staying organized is probably the most important aspect of maintaining blog activity. You can read more information about how to get and stay organized here. You can also download our content marketing scheduling tool here.

Coming up with ideas

There are a lot of great tools that you can use to find new content within your industry and community to post about. The Sendible tool, available in the Qebot platform, keeps you up to speed on your industry while providing fresh ideas for business blog topics.

Use the Keyword feature build a keyword-based feed of content useful to your industry. An example of this might be “home health care” in San Francisco, as shown below. This will keep you up to date with the happenings in your community, so you can engage the conversation with your thoughts, perspectives, and useful information you have to share about the subject.

Another useful tool to keep you informed about what’s going on is Sendible’s Suggested tool in the Qebot platform. This tool is extremely effective in showing you news articles that might be great for reposting to your social media, but can also be a great source of inspiration for your next blog. Use the content in the articles to see what people are actively engaging with, and then provide your own insight on those topics.

Time to write

You’ve now scheduled out when you need to post your blog, and you’ve come up with a great topic for your next piece of content. So where do you post?

The most effective place a business can post a blog is to their own website. This is where you want to drive traffic and eventually convert new customers. Make sure that your website provider gives you a simple and effective way to compose and post your blogs. You want your blog to be exciting and attractive, so add some imagery, a header, and valuable links to other content or other blogs you may have written, to keep the reader engaged. Long form text gets boring to most people, so use the blogging tools at your disposal to break it up and add some color and bullet points. Once finished writing (don’t forget to proofread!) publish your blog, and ensure that it has posted correctly to your website.

Distribute your blog to your awaiting readers

The time has come to share your blog! You’ve put in the effort and time to write a quality piece that your readers will love. Now you just have to get it in front of them. Here are two great ways of doing just that:

1. Social Media

By using the Sendible social media tool through Qebot, you can distribute your newly posted blog to the world via all of your social media channels with the click of a button. Simply copy the URL of the blog and paste it into the compose window, along with a fun message to attract readers. Choose the social media profiles you want to share to, schedule a post time, and hit send. Viola! Your blog is now posted to all of you social media profiles, and you can measure and engage your readers right through the portal.

2. Email Newsletter

Have you built yourself a nice customer or prospect list that you would like to share your blogs with? Use the Mailjet email marketing tool on the Qebot platform to compose a beautifully designed email newsletter to drive people to your blog. Put the heading of the blog, as well as the first sentence in your newsletter to catch the attention of your reader, and then include a link to the actual blog to drive visitors to your site.

Blogging should be one of the top tools in your content marketing strategy. And with technology to make the job easier, blogging can actually be a lot of fun. Start testing out some subjects and work on finding your tone. Remember: blogs are meant to share your voice and your expertise to your readers, so keep it professional, but don’t make it stuffy and boring. Keep your content conversational, so readers will want to continue consuming your content.

Happy Blogging!

Make sure to join us on December 17^th at 11am, PST for our webinar Creating a Business Blog. Register here.

Want to learn more about how Qebot can help you grow you business? Check us out at qebot.com.