Blogs as a Free Marketing Tool

Colombo SEO Agencies Guide To Using Blogs As A Free Marketing Tool

This article contains key facts to help small business owners to understand how to use Blogs as a free marketing tool. Blogging is a great way for small businesses to share valuable information with their customers about the industry or other relevant interest areas. Successful companies publish blog articles consistently to affirm their authority as an industry leader and subject matter expert. Search engine optimization is more than just ranking. It is a long-term strategy to make your business visible above your competition in search engine results. An SEO company in Colombo Sri Lanka should be able to develop strategies for attracting, guiding and converting the customer based on their emotional response to your web content.

 

Using Blogs as a Free Marketing Tool for Small Businesses

 

In this article:

  • Blogs as a free marketing tool
  • Creating value for your customers through blogs
  • SEO companies in Colombo for small businesses

Blogs as a Free Marketing Tool

Business owners based in Colombo and across Sri Lanka can use blogging as a way to increase interested prospects by asking website visitors to subscribe to your blog posts. By writing blogs that genuinely help readers source content that solves problems or questions, you can start to build up a database of clients/readers who sign to receive your newsletters. You now have a new database and all it cost you was a bit of your time. This is also a great time to get someone to like or share the article they just discovered with their friends via email or social media. Caaaching! You just got more readers without spending any more money! 

“80% of the visitors who come to your website will never come back. You only get one shot to engage with them! Get that email, social follow or comment and stay connected.”

Capturing Email Data & Social Media Followers

To ensure you convert these valuable readers are creating your blog posts, it’s important to make sure you have built the website in a way that allows them to engage with you and opt to receive more news and communications from you.

Software you need to install on your site to capture data

Pop Up Windows Don’t Actually Annoy People! 

If you want to use a pop up window, we highly recommend privy.com for WordPress Shopify or Magento sites. It’s a great tool and can also help you with cart abandonment, marketing automation emails and much more. Pop ups do so much more than annoy people, if used right, they will boost your website conversions by 95% within a week. Plan your give away, message and make sure you carefully think about what you can offer your clients.

Newsletters Are Seriously Valuable

When it comes to sending newsletter you should consider MailChimp or Active Campaign. There are tons of others but we find that when it comes to an easy to use newsletter system that can help with a range of email comms, these two are the front runners. With easy design functions and simple integration to most website platforms you should be pretty happy with the results.

Another thing to keep in mind is that by using simple email sending platforms, you’ll save a ton of money on design and copy writing cost.

Get People To Like & Engage With You On Social Media

Start planning your social media strategy when you’re planning your website design. Keep your design and marketing messages simple. Plan regular campaigns and remember you DO HAVE TO PAY FOR FOLLOWERS! One way or another, to get people to follow your posts and engage with your business, you should put some budget into creating content that people who want to like, follow and share. If you don’t spend on creating content, you will likely have to spend 50% – 100% more on paying for like and follows. 

Remember, creating content costs you time and some money but if you get it right, engagement and new clients will be free! Why do you think Influencer marketing is so BIG?

Once these people are following you or signed up to your newsletter, you can then add these users to your marketing funnel, where you can send more information and promotions about your business. It also helps to create a better customer experience than your competitors. 

Creating Value for your Customers Through Blogs

Blogs help consumers build trust and confidence in your brand. A user who reads your blog often naturally has a relationship with you and trusts your brand.  Most successful blogs consist of articles, checklists, and ideas that do not promote their products directly but instead give out ideas and inspire users. They aim to add value to their customers who, in turn, trust the brand to meet their needs.

SEO Companies in Colombo for Small Businesses

When choosing an SEO Agency make sure you listen to them. There’s a big difference between what a client wants and what they can have. We would all love a million followers and sales to rise by 400% but to make this happen it takes time and clever planning. Small businesses and established businesses who are just starting to really focus on digital marketing need to be extra careful selecting the right SEO and Digital Marketing Agency to work with. 

Here are some tips to help you prepare for meeting an SEO agency in Colombo

Plan for your meeting – list your overall goals and rate them from 1 to 5 of what you feel is the most important.

Have your sales goals in mind and plan Quarterly. Set small goals and build up to where you want to be.

Write down your companies Unique Selling Points. What services are in demand? What services need more help?

Know your customers… This might sound obvious but so many companies do not really know who their customers are. Make a list of your top 20 customers or customers who generate the largest share of your revenue. This could also be customers who only buy low costs products but you sell large volume.

Plan your content strategy taking into account each of the above points

As an SEO company for a small business based in Colombo, we know the importance of crafting content to be specifically informative, engaging and offering valuable solutions. One of the best ways to do this is to write blog posts incorporating keywords that your customers search for. This is a good way to make sure you are publishing relevant content which makes it easier for customers to find your business as it will help Search Engines find your blog posts. 

Integrate traditional SEO strategies

It is also a good idea to integrate traditional SEO strategies into your web site to ensure maximum exposure to your ideal customer base. Due to the relevant content, they determine to rank your business higher on the search results page. Among the many on-page and off-page optimizations in SEO, this is one of the big benefits of blogging for business owners.