Insurance Storefronts offers a blog system for the website builder platform. There are many reasons for a person to have a blog. They can provide content that answers prospective customer's questions and helps them learn about your product or service. They can help create organic traffic to your website by expanding your visibility to search engines such as Google. Ultimately, a blog can greatly increase marketing results. According to Demand Metric, on average, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than companies without blogs.
So let’s go over how to use the blog system on Insurance Storefronts. First we will go over Blog Categories to help organize your posts. After that, we will dive into actually posting a blog entry. Finally, we will go over some tips on how to better utilize your blog posts to help with generating traffic to your website.
There are a few reasons why most blogs on the internet have categories. The first reason is that it allows you to organize your blogs so that your potential customers can browse the topics that they are interested in. The second reason behind categories is that it helps search engines better understand what each page is about and rank accordingly. If you have a category page and continue adding and linking posts that are relevant to that category, it will become increasingly optimized.
To view the Blog Categories management page, click the Blog menu item on the left side of the page. This will drop down to two other menu items. Click the Categories menu item to get to the management page. There are three actions you can do as far as managing your categories; create a new blog category, edit an existing blog category, and finally delete a blog category.
Let’s begin by clicking the Create New Blog Category button. You will see a popup with two fields, Name and Slug. When coming up with a name for the category, you want to make it so that whatever posts you add to it, clearly fit that category. Don’t be too broad with your, such as using the term Insurance. Try to narrow down your category names so it is easier for people to find the blog posts they are interested in such as Medicare Advantage Plans. While entering your Name for the blog category, you will see that the Slug field is being defined as you type. This is to help optimize what is in the URL to better help search engine crawlers identify specifically what the page is about. You should never have to change this field after entering your category name. Once completed, click the Create button. You have now created your first blog category!
If you need to update a category name or slug, you can click the yellow edit button that is attached to the blog category. This works the same way as the create blog category popup. Once you have changed what you need, you can click the Update button.
You might find that you created a blog category you no longer need. To remove that category, you can click the red delete button attached to the blog category. When clicking the delete button, you will see a popup asking you to confirm that you want to delete the blog category. If you do, just click the Delete button and that blog category will be removed.
Finally, you can set the order in which your blog categories will appear on your website. Just left click on a blog category and drag it in the position you want it to appear. For example, if you want a category to be listed first, then drag it all the way to the top of the list.
Now that we got the blog categories out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of blogs, the posts themselves. There is more to a successful blog than just writing content. The first thing to understand is that you must blog consistently. By continually adding value to your community of readership, helps build your thought leadership, subscriber list and your inventory of content to promote on social media.
Utilize keyword research to help determine the topics you write about. You want to write content that is relevant to your target audience. Figure out the questions they are searching for on search engines and what your competitors are publishing on their blogs.
Adding professional and engaging images along with infographics to your blog post can greatly increase your success. Jeff Bullas cites an increase of 94% more views for blog posts that use images. You don’t need a professional graphic designer as you can use free stock images for this purpose. Make sure you select images that fit the content of the article and are not cut out on smaller screens. Google image search is on the rise and for that reason, remember to add alt text to all your images that you utilize.
Now that we have an introduction to what to do when creating content for our blog, let’s get down to how we create them on Insurance Storefronts.
On the left hand side menu, click the Blog menu item and then click the Posts in the drop-down menu which will take you to the Manage Blog Entries page. This page will show you a list of your current blog entries. It will list the following details about those entries:
Title (the title of the blog entry)
URL (where the blog entry is located)
Post Image (the main image of the blog entry)
Status (whether it is published for viewing or not)
Created At (the date of when the entry was created)
SEO Title (the meta title for the entry used for SEO)
Featured (whether the entry is featured)
Actions (actions such as edit or delete for the entry)
For now, let’s focus on the creation of a blog entry. To begin, let’s click the green Create New Post button in the upper right hand corner of the page. This will take you to the page where you will enter details for the blog entry.
When creating a new blog post, you will see several fields that make up a blog entry. We will begin with the title field.
Post Title
The Post Title field will be the main title that customers will see on the page for the blog entry. Make sure to clearly define what the blog entry will be about as well as use keywords that a customer would search for when looking for this content. When entering the Post Title, you will see that the URL Slug field will automatically be filled out for you. You will not need to modify this field with a great Post Title.
Excerpt
When viewing all of your blogs, it is important for your viewers to not only get a feel for what the blog entry is about from your title but having an excerpt that can summarize what the entry contains is vital. A great excerpt should just be about two to three sentences with a summary of important details about the blog entry.
Post Content
The Post Content is exactly what the title says, the content for the blog entry. This is where you will write out the content, add images, links, and even video media that is related to the content you’re writing about.
The content field is a rich text editor. You can format the text with color, sizing and font styling. Use the Format menu item to style the text content to match the style of your website. Important titles should be marked as headers which can be done under the Format - Blocks menu item after highlighting the text you want as a title.
When wanting to insert images, media, and links you will use the options under the Insert menu item. When inserting an image, make sure to utilize images you have uploaded to the Media system that comes with your subscription.
Adding An Image
When you want to add an image in the Post Content, click the Insert menu item and then the Image option. A popup will be displayed with several options. For the source, this is the URL where the image is located. If you uploaded an image in the Media system, make sure to copy the Public URL via right clicking on the Click Here beside the Public URL and selecting Copy link address. You can then paste this in the Source field on the Insert Image popup. For the Alternative Description field, this is where you define the image you are adding to the content. Use a description that best defines the image as well as trying to use keywords that are related to the content you are adding. The Width and Height fields will automatically get calculated to the image’s size. Instead, you want to try to use 100% for the Width and auto for the Height. This will make the image responsive for both desktop and mobile. If you want to add a caption to the image, text below the image, click the checkbox for Show Caption. Once you click save, your image will be added to the Post Content. If you selected Show Caption, you can update the text below the image that will default to the text, Caption.
Adding A Link
Adding a link is a great way to attach a resource to your content to get more information to a viewer of your blog. To add a link, highlight the text you want to be a link or just put the cursor where you want the link to be, then select Insert and then the Link option. A popup will display where you can enter the URL, the Text To Display which is what the user will see (also what you highlighted to be a link), a title which is what the user will see when hovering over the link and finally how you want the link to open. Once you are satisfied with the link, click the save button.
Inserting Media
Providing video to a blog post is pretty simple with the Post Content editor. Just click the Insert menu item and then the Media option from the drop-down menu. You will have three options: General, Embed, and Advanced. Usually, Embed is the option you will want. For example, if you want to embed a YouTube video, just paste in the embed code and click save.
Most everything else for the Post Content editor is pretty self-explanatory. To adjust text, just use the Format drop-down menu item to style the text the way you wish. The more you use the editor, the more you will be comfortable with it.
Post Details
The Post Details allow you to define a bit more about your blog post entry. The URL Slug as we discussed earlier is automatically generated when you enter your Post Title. This field should never be modified as if you have a great Post Title, the URL Slug will help with your SEO.
The Post Status field allows you to set if a blog post entry is published or not. Once it is published, the visitors to your site will be able to see your post.
The Post Category is the blog category that the post is related to. Make sure to always grow your categories and add to those categories regularly to help your SEO for your website.
Finally, we have the Featured checkbox. This will mark if this blog post entry should be highlighted more than others. Usually it will appear first and wherever you highlight your Featured Blog posts. If you have multiple featured blog post entries, the newest one will be listed first.
Post Image
The Post Image, is an image that will be displayed with the blog title and the blog excerpt when viewing all your blog posts. This image is also displayed as the main image when viewing the blog post. You can use any image you desire for your blog post. It is recommended that you use an image that is related to your blog post. When adding your Post Image, you will also see a field called Image Alt Attribute. This will be attached to your image to describe what the image is. Try to use keywords when adding this text related to your blog post. This will help your SEO for the blog post.
SEO Content
When it comes to SEO, the SEO Content section of the blog post is important. There are three fields that we must enter so that our blog post is fully optimized to get ranked on search engines.
The Meta Description is a description for the blog post that search engines evaluate. This should be at least 50 characters but no more than 160. Google will truncate the description beyond 160 characters. A great meta description should be a summary related to the blog post that you are writing.
The Meta Keywords field should be limited to 10 words. However, many search engines such as Google no longer use meta keywords in their algorithms. We recommend not spending too much time on this field as it doesn’t affect your SEO as greatly as it once did.
The SEO Title is what appears in the browser tab at the top of a page. This should be no longer than 50 to 60 characters so that search engines like Google do not rewrite your title. A well crafted title should help market the page you are trying to drive traffic too. If you page has a header, such as a title on the page content, your SEO Title should closely resemble that so that the user will know quickly what the content is about.
Once you start posting on your blog, you need to start thinking about promoting it. This will help with traffic, social shares, and other important metrics. You can begin by email marketing with your followers so that they see your blog posts. Social media is another great way to get your blog posts in front of your target audience. Finally, following the basics of SEO will help create that organic traffic to your blog posts when potential leads search those topics they are looking for information on.
The key to running a successful blog is being consistent. You should post at least once a week at the very least. Remember that a blog post doesn’t have to be a novel. As noted by Semrush, a blog post should be about 1,500 and 2,500 words long, ideally. This range allows you to cover topics in depth, provide valuable information, and optimize your content for SEO.
Following these guidelines will help generate traffic to your website and ultimately generate leads as you become a leader of thought in your field. A blog is a great way to keep your content fresh on your website, creating traffic, and providing valuable information to your readers.