5 Blog Tips for Online Business Owners in 2024

Blogging remains one of the most effective marketing strategies for lead generation, SEO, and branding. 

If you’ve determined that it’s a fit for you and your business, knowing a few essential blog tips is key, whether you do the work yourself or delegate it.

By the end of this article, you’ll learn five important blogging tips and principles:

• How to understand blogging as a marketing environment
• Knowing what makes content “high-quality” 
• SEO blogging strategies that help your blog succeed on Google
• The nuts and bolts of driving traffic to your blog
• Using your CTAs on your blog to create leads and sales 

1. Understanding the Blog as a Marketing Environment

A good blog strategy requires that you understand blogging as a marketing environment. This understanding is the foundation for everything else. 

Let’s imagine the marketing environment as a Venn diagram with three circles:

• Circle 1 is what the online business owner wants. Ultimately, this is your sales goal. If you don’t have a sales goal yet, it would be a down-channel goal that eventually leads to sales, like lead generation or traffic growth.

• Circle 2 is what Google wants. Google’s algorithm is incredibly complex, evaluating hundreds of data points to evaluate a single piece of content. Data points include things like:
• Content length
• Content type (Video? Photo? Text? Lists? Recipe?)
• If the content type matches the type of content that satisfies most searchers concerning their question (certain types of content for different questions)
• Number of photos
• Keyword-to-topic relevance and inter-keyword relations
• If, and how much, a reader clicks internal links from your content
• How long a reader stays “on-page.” 
• ETC.

None of the data points are valuable in and of themselves. 

Google’s priority is determining the content’s value to its clients, the online searcher. 

Google is a business that ultimately only cares about providing the most valuable and relevant answers to a searcher’s question. Their “bots” constantly scan and rate content to meet this goal.  

• Circle 3 is what the content consumer wants (customer, client, or reader). Consumers want solutions to their situations and problems. They seek these solutions through courses, information, advice, experiences, and products. Blogs can meet a number of these formats. 

The Venn diagram's “success sweet spot” is in the middle, where all three circles meet. You want your blog to be in this sweet spot, touching all three circles of the blog’s marketing environment.

When developing or executing a blog strategy, keep this diagram in mind or you may not be able to see the forest through the trees, as they say.

2. High-Quality Content

Now that we’ve discussed what bots consider high-quality content, what exactly makes content “high-quality” to people?

There are many definitions of “high-quality content,” and they’re primarily concerned with how a piece of content moves readers to further actions:

• How shareable is a blog?
• Is the blog viral or engaging?
• Is it good, credible, or authoritative?
• Does it meet the reader’s need for a solution in some way?
• Does it develop a relationship, brand awareness, or trust?
• ETC.

Online business owners should focus on one or more of these when blogging. Doing so should inspire readers to take further action, like sharing, signing up for an email list, or purchasing a product. 

Here are blogging tips for creating high-quality content that inspires action:

• Know your readers and the problems they seek to solve. Take my business, for example. My readers are online entrepreneurs seeking support in building their businesses without sacrificing quality of life. They want practical solutions, education, and templates to help them achieve work-life balance. They’re educated, so they’re responsive to written content and guides. They’re also super busy - so content should be helpful, fluff-free, and easy to consume and implement. 
• Plan blog topics. You can plan monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Planning topics will help you proactively manage your time and prevent barriers like writer’s block and procrastination. I use Airtable to plan blogs for the year. My spreadsheet lets me note my monthly theme and plan 4-5 blog topics under that theme. I can see the entire year at a glance.
• Use blogging tools, templates, and checklists. Blogging tools help you plan, write, edit, or research SEO. Think Grammarly, Google Docs, Airtable, or an AI writing assistant. SEO optimization resources include platforms like Surfer SEO, Ubersuggest, and Page One of Google.
• Use blog writing templates to guide you. Writing templates help you stay consistent and allow you to systemize content writing. 
• Make sure the content is scannable. Use headlines, formatting, and editing to create lots of white space and guide the reader through long-form content. 
• Make sure content publication schedules are consistent. People like consistency, and so do algorithms!

Many of these rely on establishing good, sustainable blog habits. I’ve got a Habit Masterclass and Workbook to help.

3. Blogging Strategies for Getting Traffic

There are two types of traffic.

Traffic can be organic (free) or paid-for advertising. We’ll focus on blog strategies that create organic traffic.

Getting organic traffic is a numbers game, and you need to market your blog to attract readers. 

You can market it by publicizing and sharing blog posts and getting others to do the same.

Social media marketing is one of the most popular ways to market anything, including your blog. Here’s an example of what marketing a blog on social media might look like: 

• Mine topics and themes on your blog to inspire social media conversations.
• Engage with your people around these themes and topics.
• Document and share your personal experience with them. 
• Ensure that your blog posts offer them something extra to build on the social media conversations: more in-depth information, a resource, or detailed advice. 
• Use a link in your social media post to direct them to your blog 
• People should love engaging with you on social media and find extra value in your blog.

Guesting on another platform or guest blogging is also an effective way to send people to your blog. 

Can you write for someone or secure an invite to a podcast? Could you write for a publication? How about guesting on someone else’s Instagram?  

• Mid-blog check-in: Which of these 3 blog tips do you already use? Which one could you most easily start using or improve?

4. SEO Basics

• Keywords: Keyword research involves finding several keywords related to your topic, main keyword, and each other. Use one or two SEO research plugins on your browser. My SEO writer likes Surfer SEO and Ubersuggest. These will provide lists of highly related keywords and other valuable data. Avoid high and mid-competitive keywords. Using a keyword too much can trigger bots to flag your content. A good rule of thumb is to use each keyword every 300 words.  
• HTML Titles: Use keywords in HTML titles (H1, H2, H3, etc). Bots use these titles to scan and learn about your blog - what it’s about and how it should be indexed. Use your main keyword in the H1 title and place any of the keywords in one or two subtitles.
• Images: Images can be graphics, graphs, photos, etc. But you’d ideally use at least 3 for SEO. Each image should have an “img alt text” description that integrates your main keyword.
• Page titles and meta descriptions: Don’t forget to use your main keyword in your meta description and blog page title.
• Linking for authority: Use one or two external links to high-authority sites. If you don’t use an SEO tool to see a site’s authority score, a good rule is to use a source at the top of Google’s Page One. You should easily recognize its “name” and feel confident in its credibility. Create internal links to other resources or pages on your website. A blog post should have more internal links than external ones. Links to your content from external sites are also important.   
• Monitoring analytics over time: A blog strategy is a long-term investment. It takes months for bots to index and rank new content. Many experts often advise taking at least one year to create a blog to show reliable results and patterns. Monitor vital analytics like page visits, bounce rates, and rank changes and aim for steady growth over time.  

5. Leads and Sales

Using your blog to generate leads and sales is where the rubber meets the road. 

Here are three common ways these conversions take place:

• When someone submits their email address to your email list
• When someone buys a product from your website or shop
• When someone signs up for a product waitlist

You need to use a CTA (call-to-action) to prompt blog readers to take a conversion-focused action.

CTAs can appear several times within a piece of content, but one should appear at the end. My blog writer recommends using a CTA every 500-650 words of content. 

Of course, many bloggers use more CTAs or CTAs in different formats. For example, in one 2000-word blog, a CTA could appear every 600 words. You’d have four CTAs total and could format one as a pop-up, one as a sign-up form, one as written text, and one in a bio. 

Take a Step Towards Using These Blog Tips

Use a template to easily and quickly outline your blogs. 

I've put together some simple and effective blog outline templates for online business owners. Using templates like these helps me immensely, and I’d love to share them with you and see what you think!