How to Create a Successful Business Blog

It's okay to use your resources. Take a look at other business blogs and find a style that's comfortable for you. See how other businesses approach topics relative to their business.

There are three questions you must ask yourself for any business blog and just for good writing in general:
1. Who is the core target audience?

2. What will be delivered to that audience; for example, tips, recipes, success stories, new ideas for common problems?

3. What will be the outcome for the audience; for instance, how will their lives or businesses be improved as a result of reading this information?

Ask yourself how your business marketing plan connects with your social media and blogging goals. Blogging can strengthen and even in some cases replace many marketing activities. It is a way to connect with your customer on a regular/ consistent basis.

Overwhelmed business owners and marketing professionals can’t imagine adding one more thing—in this case blogging—to what they’re already doing to market and grow their business.

Blog articles can be great for sending as follow-ups to business meetings with a potential customer.  You can also use your blog as your social media. Replacing random thoughts and comments with solid articles helps to build business credibility.

By now you should have a solid understanding of what your blog is and how it can matter. You should have relevant topics in mind to address any needs you believe your customer may have down the road that potentially you can solve.

It's good to keep your mission statement in mind when you do this. If you are stumped on coming up with ideas you can use relevant articles published in magazines and research other articles on the web. Then you just have to summarize it, make it your own, be unique and interesting. Use that as a starting point.

Set a regular schedule and monitor your results. Without results there is no way to tell if your blog is working. Your schedule will vary based on the size of your business and the size of business exposure you seek. If you want minimal exposure but are seeking to build business credibility than once to twice a week is plenty. If you want an increased amount of exposure and you are seeking the opportunity to build new customers and/ or sell more product than a more moderate 3-5 times a week may be more likely to achieve these types of results. If you are a large business than you will definitely want to be blogging daily. Daily blogging = increased exposure and prolonged results. Customers shopping retail often run their searches on the nights and weekends. By having a plan that integrates nights and weekends you are guaranteed more exposure for your products.
Blogging can be the perfect method to make a soft sell and can be used to advertise regularly while educating the client/ customer, but you must monitor your results.

The only way to know if your blogging is working is to monitor whether you’re meeting your business goals.

Determine which results are most meaningful to your business:

• If your goal is to build trusting, long-term relationships, you should see a rise in subscriptions.
• If your goal is to generate new leads, you should be booking new clients or selling products.
• If your goal is to gain wider exposure, you should see an increase in blog comments, as well as shares, likes and comments on social media.

Its important to track your visitors, page views, and shares to make sure that you are gaining the type of exposure you are seeking.

Once you do these things it's a matter of continuing to develop content that is unique and interesting to your target audience.

There are more than 2 Billion people surfing the web each day. That means there is a lot of opportunity to be heard and seen. Take advantage of it and start spreading your website virally via blogging www.blogbloomer.com

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media should be an integral part of your overall marketing strategy, and what I mean by integral is that it should be working together with your current marketing strategy to help you meet the business goals that you have set on an annual basis. To help you see how social media works as a strategic marketing tool I'm going to walk you though a step-by-step guide designed to assist you with planning in a manner that works side-by-side with your physical marketing and business development needs.

Step 1. Define Your Goals
Your goals should be defined in line with your current brand and style. The way that you define and do business on a regular basis, and what matters to you as a business. For example: if your business goal is to get more children to buy your new line of children's clothing you may want to use primary colors and block or collegiate text as part of your plan when developing the look of your blog and facebook page.  To help push sales of that clothing line you may want to post links to your relevant fashion articles on Pinterest. Determining the need for facebook, pinterest, or linkedin are all part of your tactic (see step 6) which can be researched and supported by a social media strategy company like BlogBloomer.

Step 2. Look at Your Company's Needs
This is an overall look at your company needs whether it be staffing, resources, investors/ monetary, customer growth. You have to know where your company is hurting to know how to help it heal.

Step 3.Set Your Objectives and Allocate Budget
Based on your annual goals to increase sales in a specific area of your target market you can then begin to determine a social media budget and allocate resources to that planned budget. To determine the right budget for your business needs determine what types of social media you are interested in using to increase customer interest of your product or service. For instance, you may outsource (graphic design and video production) to improve the look of your website. You may purchase additional advertising online or try and increase your website views through blogging done for your business by a web content developer like Blog Bloomer. Determine how the costs of these may impact your current spendings for physical marketing and networking and monitor and track the return on your investment. If you are not seeing a physical increase in sales and/ or interest in your product and service in the first year that you attempt social media marketing strategy you may either need to increase your budget, try different social media tactics or better research your competition and how they use social media to increase their viability.

Step 4. Identify Your Customer
You probably already have a general idea of who your customer is just in general from the types of people that come in the door, but by integrating social media into your plan you can get specific reports on who reads about you, where they are from demographically, and what markets they serve. This helps you to improve your advertising by tailoring it to the specific needs of your customer. It assists you with branding and knowing your customers interests, and improves your chances of overcoming social and demographic obstacles that keep you and your target customer base apart.

Step 5. Research the Competition
Through the use of social media you can use proven strategies that are already working for your larger competitors.

Step 6. Choose Tactics
Does your competitor have a facebook page, use pinterest to increase product sales, or have social profiles on linked in to increase professional credibility. All of these things work together to create the right customer base as it relates to the customer on their level of search-ability.

Step 7. Create Content Strategy
Without great content your social media strategy is useless.
There are 3 key components of social media strategy:
1. Type of Content
2. Post Frequently
3. Time of Posting
Anyone can start a blog but to know the customer, be able to develop relevant and updated content, on a consistent and frequent basis that is both interesting and relative to trending key terms that are more frequently searched