How to Grow Your Business Online With Blogging

A successful business can help you fulfil your dreams and achieve financial freedom.

However, in 2019, the failure rate of startups was around 90%.

Why is that? 

What are the most significant reasons new businesses fail? 

And what can you do to grow your business online?

According to business owners, reasons for failure include:

• Money running out 
• Being in the wrong market
• A lack of research
• Bad partnerships
• Ineffective marketing
• Not being an expert in the industry

I don’t claim to have all the answers, but after years of researching and writing about blogging, let me share the most practical insights I’ve learned so far on how to grow your business online using a blogging sales funnel.

Why blogging sales funnel to grow your business?

Marketing plays a vital role in your business success, and most businesses struggle with marketing, particularly online.

Businesses spend a ton of money on websites and blogs that don’t work. 

• They are not sure how to build a website
• Their website design and content don’t connect with their audience 
• They struggle to get website organic website traffic
• They have no system in place to capture emails and build an email list
• If they have an email list, they have no idea what to email those customers

The secret to solving these marketing problems is having a blogging sales funnel using the following frameworks:

• WordPress
• StoryBrand
• Blogging

Let’s explore creating a blogging sales funnel that works and take the guesswork out of your marketing efforts.

No matter the size of your business, creating a sales funnel is the easiest way to grow your business. It’s the missing puzzle of your marketing that you’ve been looking for.

How to build a website

Over 40% of the websites use WordPress as their website’s foundation. If the website is a car, WordPress would be the engine. 

There are plenty of website builders out there. However, the WordPress content management system is my personal favourite for the following reasons. 

• It is an open-source content management system
• Fully customisable and you can extend the features as your business grows
• A huge choice of plugins and technical support options 
• You own your content 100%

Indeed, there is a learning curve if you want to manage your website yourself. However, in my opinion, it is worth learning how to use WordPress or subscribing to a WordPress support service for the long term success of your website and the growth of your business. 

Some of my WordPress plugins to create a website or blog are:

• Genesis theme
• Yoast SEO plugin
• Gravity forms 
• Succuri security 
• Backup buddy  

No need to spend time re-inventing the wheel. Get up and running with the most popular content management system on the internet and start growing your business or you can also take help from a website development consultant.

How to design a website and create content that converts

This is probably the most challenging part of any business owner or marketer when it comes to growing your business online.

Designing the best website or a blog can cost you a lifetime.

I would highly recommend keeping it simple.

It is great to have a perfectly designed website. However, most businesses need a simple website with the right content and functionality to generate leads to grow their businesses.

It is worth reminding you that content is still king on the internet.

My favourite way to design and create content for your website is using the StoryBrand framework. A brand script gives you everything you need to create your website content that works.

Seven elements of a brand script which helps you develop your prospect’s story are:

1. A character 
2. Problems
3. Guide 
4. Plan
5. Call to action
6. What success looks like
7. How it will feel if fails 

Understanding these story elements will transform your marketing efforts forever. Also, these story elements will give you everything you need to design a website wireframe and content that helps you grow a business. 

How to get website traffic

Following are the common ways small businesses usually get initial traction when growing a business. 

• Word of mouth
• Networking 
• Joint ventures 
• Customer referrals

All of these are tried and tested ways to bootstrap a business. However, if you want to take your business to the masses, you usually require mass traffic to your offline or online store.

Common ways to get massive traffic are:

1. Paid traffic
2. Organic traffic 

Paid traffic

Getting paid traffic to your website works great if you can get more money than what you spend on your marketing.

If you have figured this out, paid traffic usually is the fastest way to grow your business. However, finding a paid marketing channel with a positive ROI is challenging as any other marketing channel.

Even if this marketing channel works for you, it generally stops when you stop paying for the traffic.

Organic traffic

Organic traffic at the start certainly is the uphill battle. Although you don’t pay for it, it requires serious time and resources investment. 

The positive of organic traffic, particularly from SEO, is that once you start getting rankings for your targeted keywords, it can bring organic traffic for the long term to help you grow your business. 

Because of this reason, I evangelise blogging to create quality informational posts and pages to build your long-term content assets. 

Summary of different types of website traffic

• Paid ads
  • Require marketing dollars
  • Hard to get the ROI
  • Stops the moment you stop paying
• Blogging
  • Hard and time consuming to create content
  • Time-consuming 
  • If works, it can be a long term win 

Conclusion

Growing a business with blogging is hard. Also, it is a marathon, not a hundred-meter sprint. However, blogging can be one of the best marketing tools if you are passionate about your business and can create content regularly.

You can start creating content to improve your customer services by answering frequently asked questions, which you can use to save time with your customer services. Over time, these content pages can potentially bring in search traffic as well to help you grow your business online.

Choose to blog to grow your business if it makes sense for your long-term business goals.

What is your favourite way to grow your business online?