Build Your Blog to Attract New Business

• Answer consumer questions: If your blog is producing content that answers the questions that your sales team gets everyday from prospects and customers, you're going to be extremely successful. To make this even simpler, ask yourself what are the questions your potential customers ask during your initial conversations as those are the most important to address. Understanding what our target audience is looking for and what excites them enough to visit our blogs is the key to generating business with this vehicle. Our posts like Using Color in Ad Design and Designing Business Cards for Your Brand answer some questions often asked by our clients.

• Incorporate predictions to make your content relevant: We all read with the hope of finding out what will happen and how we can deal with it successfully. I am big follower of Hubspot because they do that effectively and make digital marketing easier for their customers. Similarly, marketers and companies that look ahead and talk about trends to help people navigate them are trusted more by customers. For example, our blog post on  7 Tools for SMB Marketers demonstrates how new marketing technologies improve companies' present ways of doing business.

• Share facts for better customer confidence: Based on my personal experience, it is difficult to question statements that are backed by facts. Quoting numbers from research firms and industry leaders in your posts gives more credibility to your blog. Presenting statistics as infographics allows you to share info while enhancing posts visually. Featuring industry statistics and trends is also a very good pull strategy, since adding your take on the situation could make for interesting reading and guarantee repeat visits.

• Showcase your work to get future orders: Viewers notice and appreciate when we share designs we've created so they can see our expertise and skills. Many of the posts that have the highest views include specific samples to support our advice. Our recent post on New Year's Ads, got a huge response and many were repeat visitors.

• Use social media to market to the key decision makers: One of the best places to market your blog is LinkedIn. This channel has the highest number of key decision-makers. Targeting them becomes much easier on LinkedIn, as they hang out in industry-related groups and others based on their expertise, education and professional roles. One of the best ways to connect with them is by actively participating on LinkedIn groups. Find discussions to which you can contribute value. Then once in a while, you can modestly mention in an "oh-and-by-the-way" fashion that your business solves this or that problem and attach some relevant content to back it up.

• Invite guest bloggers for a fresh perspective: Having outsiders such as clients or industry leaders contribute to your blog brings new ideas. Whenever you come across an associate interested in topics related to your blog, ask him or her to do a guest blog post. You could publish an introductory article before their guest post to let your audience know about it in advance. SEO tips shared by George Bounacos were in line with our offerings and drew quite a bit of traffic as he shared SEO guidelines to help businesses establish a presence online and increase their profitability.

Some metrics that we follow to see if our blog is targeting the right people are: