Many of you have a blog on your website, but it’s important to understand the purpose that your blog performs.

If you’re a professional blogger, then your blog is the main event. Professional bloggers earn money through affiliate links embedded in their posts, sponsored posts and from traffic that earns them income through an ad network.

Most of the women (and the occasional good dude) that I design websites for are not professional bloggers, but they have a blog. (I fall into this category too!) If you’re going to be putting energy into posting regularly, then you need to know exactly why you’re doing it!

For service providers, your blog should:

  • Drive traffic to your website so that people can learn about you and your amazing services. In order for this to work, you need to be sharing your blog content on social and in your newsletter if you have one.
  • Increase your know-like-trust factor. Most people won’t buy from you the first time they land on your site. But if you’re producing good content that people read regularly, they’ll grow to know and like you over time. This leads to TRUST which leads to $$.
  • Help you to capture emails. You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again. Email lists drive sales. And you control them unlike your social media platforms. Enough said.

If you’re selling a product, pretty much everything still applies, only you’d be pitching for product sales and not services. Blogs are typically less important for product-based businesses unless they improve the user’s experience (tutorials, etc).

For all of this to work your blog should have:

  • A sidebar with important information like a little about blurb, and links to important website pages (like your services/offering). If people come to your blog post from an outside link, this helps provide context for them if it’s the first time visiting your website.
  • Ways to stay connected prominently displayed. Make sure that someone who is just visiting your sit for the first time can easily find your social media channels to follow you and pop in their email address somewhere if they are so inclined.
  • The content of each post itself should serve to reinforce your status as an expert on your area of authority. You don’t have to come off as a know-it-all to do this; just make sure the content is relevant to your brand and services – ALWAYS!

What you really want is to get people onto your email list so that you can increase your the amount of interaction you have with them. A great way to do this is to create downloadable resources for each blog post, or to have some evergreen ones you can consistently promote. Within each blog post you can then promote the corresponding downloadable resource!

For instance, if your blog post is about healthy meal ideas, you can create a free meal planner PDF and then promote it. Or if you have a more intensive lead magnet, like a recipe book, then you can always say something like “if you like these recipes, you’ll love my yada yada recipe book”.

Remember, your blog is a great way of providing useful information to your potential customers. It delivers great value – and that’s important! But, for the purposes of your business, your blog serves to turn viewers into customers, and you need to keep that in mind!

For tips on how to make your opt-in stand out view this post for SquareSpace sites. WordPress users can check out my free SkillShare course here.

Best of luck! Xx, Kara

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SiteGround (best WordPress host) ➡️ https://www.kcocreative.com/siteground

Divi (great WordPress theme) ➡️ https://www.kcocreative.com/divi

Squarespace ➡️ https://www.kcocreative.com/squarespace

Affiliate links! I only promote services that I have used myself, regardless of whether I have an affiliate account with them, and using affiliate links when available helps me to continue to provide useful information at no cost to my viewers/readers/peeps. Thank you 🥰