Blogging Strategies for Startups and Established Businesses

Introduction

Welcome back to the Bootstrap Digital Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Laura Tate, and today we’re discussing Mastering Business, Blogging, to Attract, Engage, and Convert Your Audience. This is the first in a series about creating brand awareness through blogging So you can grow your startup or your established business from zero awareness to landing million-dollar contracts.

I have utilized blogging and social media, email, and other online marketing tools to grow brand awareness for my and my clients’ businesses and attract and convert leads. One of the main components has been blogging.

So today, we’ll talk about the benefits of blogging, case studies, and important considerations when setting up a blog. I’ll share tools I use for myself and my clients and give you some key tips.

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Mastering Business Blogging: An Online Course Preview

Of course, you won’t learn everything you need to know about business blogging in today’s episode. So good news, I have an online class taking place on March 22nd at 1:00 PM Pacific Standard Time, and in that class this month, on March 22nd, I’ll go more in-depth on the steps you need to take to master business blogging.

I’ll show you interactively some tools I use to help you research blog ideas, keywords, and tools that help you start writing, even if you’re not a writer. So if you want to register for that, sign up with the link; I’ll put the link into my show notes. I also share it on my website, crackerjack scribe.com, or any of my social media pages.

Benefits of Business Blogging

Okay, let’s discuss why a blog is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. So you’ve launched a business or a startup. Now what? You’re brand new, you’ve got the startup, and nobody knows about you. Nobody knows about your product. How do you get noticed? One of the first ways to get noticed is with blogging. Of course, you’ve got to have a website. You’ve got to have some sort of online place where you’re going to publish your blog. 

And you need a strategy; you’ve got to have a plan in place, and I’ve got some other episodes that you can listen to to help you build your strategy.

Start with episode one. I start talking about setting goals. You’ve got to set your goals and do your research. You got to identify your target audience. 

But a big component of building your brand awareness is a blog. It is an ongoing tool that will help you bring traffic to your website and build up your SEO—search engine optimization. It’ll give you a way to establish your brand authority and identity and something to share on all your social media channels. It’s invaluable, a business blog. 

So these are just a couple of reasons that explain the importance of blogging, but let me share a few success stories that resulted from my content marketing efforts and why blogging was essential to these successes.

Successful Case Studies in Business Blogging

Here are a few business blog examples:

I have taken a startup from zero brand awareness to landing million-dollar contracts.

I worked with the startup from the beginning. They didn’t have any online assets and no brand awareness. They didn’t have a website, no social media channels, except for maybe LinkedIn. And they certainly didn’t have a blog. So I conducted company interviews, researched the industry and competitors, the best keywords to use, and crafted a content marketing strategy that included a blog, social media, and email. 

We had a website built and a blog incorporated. And we started executing our content marketing strategy. Of course, we did use other methods, such as press releases and social media advertising. But the blog was and still is the main component where most, if not all, of our lead conversions took place. 

And many of these conversions resulted in successful collaborations, partnerships, and, yes, million-dollar contracts. And I know specifically one contract was the direct result of a targeted user searching the internet for a particular keyword that we optimized the website and the blog with, and that’s how they found this startup. 

Remember, a success story like this does not take one, two, or three months, not even six months. For you to succeed, you’ve got to put time into it, but if you do your research, craft a well-thought-out strategy, and put the work in, it will result in success, and you will achieve your goals. 

I have helped an agency, a real estate agency that had a goal of being bought out by a billion-dollar corporation. So they contracted me to build up their brand awareness, and one way we did it was with a blog, and eventually, it took a year and a half of building up their brand, and they were bought out by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

Another example, I have another longtime client, and a blog is a key part of our marketing strategy. And throughout the years, they have landed ongoing contracts worth seven figures, and one of the main components that have attracted these ongoing clients is their blog. 

My Top 3 Blogging Platforms

So say you’re a startup, a brand new business, and you have no idea where to begin; as I mentioned earlier, you must have your marketing strategy in place. You have to know who your audience is. But now what? So you’ve decided you are going to build a website and you’re going to have a blog, or maybe you already have your website, but it doesn’t have a blog. The first thing to consider is what platform you should use. Where are you going to publish this blog?

WordPress

My recommendation is WordPress. I use WordPress for all my clients. I use it for myself. But WordPress it’s been around since the early 2000s. One of the first major blogging platforms out there, and there are a lot of content websites like TechCrunch and Mashable; I think even Time Magazine and other big websites like that use WordPress not only to build their website but also to regularly publish articles.

You can build a whole website with WordPress and have a blog, or you can just have your blog on WordPress. There is a medium to difficult learning curve on how to use it. It depends on how savvy you are with technology.

You can hire an agency or a website builder to build your blog , but you can also do it yourself. 

Here are the positives of WordPress. You can design any way you want. It’s a drag-and-drop building platform, but it’s also highly customizable. There are a lot of SEO tools, photo galleries, social media sharing tools, and all sorts of ways to optimize your blog for greater reach.

So the only downside for me is the learning curve. You have to take some time to learn how to use it. 

Medium

All right. My second recommendation is Medium. So Medium is a blog or article publishing platform, and it started free for everybody, free to read and publish so they could generate a base of writers and readers.

But now, if you want to read more than three articles a month, I think that’s the limit; then you have to subscribe for $5 a month. So the upside to Medium, it’s free to publish. You can even get paid for publishing, which is why they did the subscriber route for readers. But the limited thing about that is that you get limited exposure because they have it gated after three articles.

But then the upside is if you become a member and publish your blog there regularly, you can earn money, and they promote your blogs to get in front of people, and they have more than a hundred million members. So there are a lot of readers on there, and it’s highly targeted. So you can sign up, and you can follow different publishers or writers, and you can follow different topics, and so on.

It’s very organized. So if you’re only interested in particular topics or write about particular topics, you can easily find those, and people can easily find your content. So the upside, free to publish, you can earn money, and your articles get greater reach if you’re a member. 

You can also republish. So, for instance, if you have a WordPress blog, you can republish your posts on Medium. They have a canonical setting where you can let Medium know that this article you’re republishing was published elsewhere, so that way, Google won’t ding you as far as ranking. 

And the downside, it’s behind a subscription gate. So while they have a hundred million members, if you blog on a more open platform and market yourself, you’re more open to greater reach. 

LinkedIn

My third recommendation for blogging is LinkedIn. You can set up a blog on your LinkedIn profile, and it’s free. You can add images, and you can add videos, and links back to your website. And the upside of publishing on LinkedIn regularly, especially if you’re in the B2B industry, is that your audience is already built in there, right on the platform.

And if you have a following, they’re immediately alerted when you have a new post. LinkedIn will let everybody know if you wrote a great article and might even put you in one of their weekly roundups, and you can share immediately with groups. You can also publish a newsletter on LinkedIn, so if you have the bandwidth to tackle more content creation, it’s another great way to increase brand presence and establish yourself as a leader in your field.

I can’t think of any cons except if you’re going to use that as your sole source of blogging, it’s limited behind LinkedIn’s gate. More likely, blogs on WordPress or other open-source platforms come up first rather than an article on LinkedIn. 

Okay, my recommended three platforms are WordPress, Medium, and LinkedIn.

Join the Online Class, Subscribe to the Podcast

Now, if you want to get more in-depth and get some more insight and tips on how to master blogging, I have a class on March 22nd at 1:00 PM online via Zoom. The link to register will be in the show notes. The course title is Mastering Business Blogging to Attract, Engage, and Convert Your Audience , the same as this episode, but we’re going to go more in-depth, and there’ll be other tools that I’ll talk about that you can use.

So join me on March 22nd, 1:00 PM. And thank you for listening, and if you haven’t subscribed yet to the Bootstrap Digital Marketing Podcast, do so now so that you’re alerted when the next episode comes out.