You might think your company’s online hub is your website. It looks like the one place that connects every facet of your online presence in one place.
But that doesn’t have to be the case if you have a blog. Your blog holds the potential to serve as an even better hub.
Most firms start a blog because someone suggested the business needed one. If that’s what happened in your case, you were probably told that it’s a great way to convert site visitors into customers.
Although this can turn out to be true, you should also be using your blog to direct your readers to the places you want them to go. (There’s a key for how to do this that we’ll get to in a bit).
Link Your Social Media
It’s probably fair to say that you have links to your social media accounts somewhere on your website proper already, but are they also readily available on your blog? They should be.
You also should be posting your blog posts to your social media accounts, whenever you can. Some businesses have found a terrific new outlet for blogging through social media.
You can use social media sites such as Tumblr to share content and comments, which makes it a great outlet when you have something to share with followers of your business that may not be substantial enough to make an entire post on your general blog. Short bursts of business information, in 140 characters or less, can be fun to share on Twitter as well, and can be a great way to pique interest among potential customers.
Are you aware that you can also blog directly on Facebook now? There are definite benefits to this, especially when you consider the fact that social media is such a great way to reach consumers directly and connect with them on a more basic level.
Use In-Text Links
Another way that you can turn your blog into a hub for your business, even if it’s centralized on Facebook, is through the use of in-text links. In other words, you can link out to other blogs with the hope that you may inspire some reciprocal blog posts in the future.
It’s certainly a good way to lead customers to other pertinent information, but you also want to make sure you include links to your own words and pages.
If you discuss a service or product you offer in your blog post, make sure to include a link to a page where people can learn more about it or can purchase it directly. The links that you include in your blog posts could make a huge difference in how long people stay on your website, not to mention the potential for turning a casual visitor into an actual customer.
Always Close With a Call to Action
Included in those in-text links could be one that goes straight to your call to action at the end of every blog post. You don’t have to use a link here; it could be a phone number for the reader to call, or it could even be where you share an email address for them to reach out to you.
However, if the intent of your call to action is to show the person a product you spoke about in the blog post, then you’ll want to link to it and let them know the next step is to make the purchase.
You want to give your readers good reasons to stick around your site, so you need to make sure you give them a good deal of info within your blog post and let them know what they need to do next, once they finish reading.
Make that link worth clicking for them. Compose your call to action just right and it could make you some money.
