3 Essential Tools to Utilize When Starting a Company Blog Hello Bar, Helplama and Yoast SEO are must-haves for a new blog.
By Will Caldwell Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In today's world of online marketing, having a company blog is key. Blogs may sound old-school, but without one, you'll be leaving a lot of traffic out of the picture. The fact of the matter is that a blog can help your company can engage with its customers in an interesting way by providing valuable insight into your product or market.
The most traditional reason companies have their own blog is to express their opinion. Now, with the rise in content marketing, companies use their blogs to compete for traffic. Marketers take a long-tail keyword approach, meaning they target their blog posts around detailed Google searches.
As an example, Baarb, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to create a personalized travel booking experience, uses its blog to target long searches like, "Where to Stay Like a Hipster in California" or "Top Five Things to do in Reykjavik". By structuring their blog posts around more detailed questions, Baarb has a better chance of ranking these blog posts on Google when someone searches for these answers. Though traffic numbers for more detailed searches aren't as high as a broader search, detailed searches provide very targeted traffic from people looking for a specific answer.
Once you have someone on your company blog, it's time to figure out how to convert them into a customer. That is where the following tools come in:
Hello Bar
I'm sure you've seen those annoying pop-ups that try to trick you by hiding the close button and moving right before you click on the "x" so you get stuck going to their website. Annoying, right? That isn't the way to reach new customers and leads. That just annoys potential customers into frustratingly exiting your webpage. So, what's the solution?
Hello Bar gives your company a way to reach visitors without annoying them. Rather than creating an annoying pop-up ad, Hello Bar allows you to customize a bar that will go at the top of your webpage. You can change the colors, fonts and message easily from the Hello Bar dashboard and then choose the social engagement you want to pursue such as a Facebook Like, Tweet, Follow on Twitter or Pin on Pinterest. This way, you get your message across in an aesthetically pleasing and, more importantly, unobtrusive way.
Helplama
Run through this scenario in your head. Your sales team is trying to target your product to customers and develop more leads. How are they attempting to do that? Emails? Phone calls? Either way, those techniques are outdated and ineffective in today's tech savvy culture. Instead, try Helplama.
Once Helplama is installed into your company's blog, it provides extremely effective means of communication for both your sales and customer service teams. Helplama creates a bot based off your stores previous chat record and then tests freelancers to hire with this bot. Once you hire a freelancer based on their domain knowledge, personality and skills, you'll be able to track conversions and return-on-investment so you can understand performance. This allows customers to ask questions directly to representatives of your team, giving customers answers to their questions immediately, thus increasing consumer confidence in purchasing your product.
Yoast SEO
The last essential step to having your blog dominate the competition is probably the simplest. In today's search engine-driven world, your blog needs to pop up on Google searches near the top or no one is ever going to find your company's page. That's where Yoast SEO comes in.
Yoast SEO is a plugin that allows you to optimize your search engine results while acting as a full website optimization platform. It will allow you to: add descriptions to all your posts, set keywords to be focused on, check your page for readability and more. With one plugin, you can be seen more often on specific search results and optimize your entire webpage to be more efficient.
If your company doesn't have a blog, it's time to start one. As an entrepreneur, you need to make the most of every resource available to you, and a company blog is one of the simplest ways to start. By utilizing tools like Hello Bar, Helplama and Yoast SEO, you'll be on the right track in no time.
