According to Nigerian Communication Company (NCC) data, a statistical analysis reveals that over 141.7 million people are online, engaging in activities such as scrolling, shopping, and searching for services in Nigeria.
Unfortunately, many small business owners lack sufficient customers or are barely known online. However, these online business owners have yet to realize that without solid online visibility, their competitors, who consistently writing about their service using a WordPress blog and maintain a strong online presence, will appear on Google search when people need their services.
According to a recent information, what limits many Nigerian small bussiness owners from ranking high and missing opportunities for sales and obtaining online publicity is, they think randomly sharing about their business with mouth alone, lack of basic knowledge to run bussines, designing flyer, they have no website for blog content, just a word of mouth and social media account that can be suspended at any minute, and limited marketing strategies. These are the challenges Nigerian small businesses face, which hinder their ability to rank high on Google search, achieve strong online visibility, and expand their reach.
Given the recurring problems small businesses face, every entrepreneur must have and utilise a WordPress blog. As an intentional business owner, the fastest, most reliable, and efficient way for many recent business owners to stand out among competitors and attract good sales is through using a WordPress blog.
In this piece, we will explain the advantages of writing a blog post, why you should choose WordPress for your blog, and provide real, practical guides to start your own blogging in Nigeria.
Benefits of a WordPress Blog for Nigerian Businesses
A recent realisation about Nigerian business owners is that they often overlook creating blogs for their businesses. They forget that a simple blog can be a game-changer for their business by doing the following:
- Build credibility and Trust. Regular blogging posts provide your audience with access to your latest and greatest stocks or product. It’s proof that you are on the right track to learning and growing in business, which will help you gain trust and authority. Imagine a decorator who shares her daily activities, recent projects, struggles, and successes, along with the stories of her customers. Over time, people will stop seeing them as just a decorator, but rather as someone with authority and reliability they can trust.
- Improve Search Engine Visibility. SEO is a crucial tool for ranking blog posts and also providing a signal on a keywords to focus on. It is what will help your blog post rank high in search results. If someone searches for “best decorator in Lagos” on Google, the business with the most helpful content will appear first, thanks to practical SEO usage, even as a small business owner competing with big brands.
- Engage Customers. Be strategic when writing your blog. Ensure your blogs provide a space for customers to share their opinions, stories, comments, and ask questions. And at the end of your blog, there should be a call to action. Don’t forget to lead with empathy.
- Cost-effective Marketing. Having a blog post is far more effective than using ads to gain visibility and trust. With a good blog post, you can write once a week, and people will continue to find it in a month or a year. This provides a significant service advantage for you and your business, as it offers a long-term benefit, unlike ads that can drain your money and have a short lifespan, content writing is free and the king , while ads speed up the sales if done currently and it stoped once the money stopped.
As a Nigerian business owner, whether small or large, it’s advisable to have a blog to gain credibility, visibility, and constant customer engagement, positioning yourself among the top 1% in the your industry.
Why WordPress is The Best Platform for Nigerian Businesses
A recent realisation about Nigerian business owners is that they often overlook creating blogs for their businesses. They forget that a simple blog can be a game-changer for their business by doing the following:
- Build credibility and Trust. Regular blogging posts provide your audience with access to your latest and greatest stocks or product. It’s proof that you are on the right track to learning and growing in business, which will help you gain trust and authority. Imagine a decorator who shares her daily activities, recent projects, struggles, and successes, along with the stories of her customers. Over time, people will stop seeing them as just a decorator, but rather as someone with authority and reliability they can trust.
- Improve Search Engine Visibility. SEO is a crucial tool for ranking blog posts and also providing a signal on a keywords to focus on. It is what will help your blog post rank high in search results. If someone searches for “best decorator in Lagos” on Google, the business with the most helpful content will appear first, thanks to practical SEO usage, even as a small business owner competing with big brands.
- Engage Customers. Be strategic when writing your blog. Ensure your blogs provide a space for customers to share their opinions, stories, comments, and ask questions. And at the end of your blog, there should be a call to action. Don’t forget to lead with empathy.
- Cost-effective Marketing. Having a blog post is far more effective than using ads to gain visibility and trust. With a good blog post, you can write once a week, and people will continue to find it in a month or a year. This provides a significant service advantage for you and your business, as it offers a long-term benefit, unlike ads that can drain your money and have a short lifespan, content writing is free and the king , while ads speed up the sales if done currently and it stoped once the money stopped.
As a Nigerian business owner, whether small or large, it’s advisable to have a blog to gain credibility, visibility, and constant customer engagement, positioning yourself among the top 1% in the your industry.
Step-by-step Guide to Starting Your WordPress Blog in Nigeria
Step 1: Pick a Niche & target Audience
Let’s assume you are a small business event decorator in Nigeria, which is your niche. Your blog post content should primarily focus on: event decoration mistakes to avoid in Nigerian weddings, exclusive and inexpensive decoration ideas, and traditional and modern decorations in Nigeria.
Target Audience:
- People plan personal celebrations, such as birthdays, weddings, and funerals, which are core occasions that occur regularly.
- Corporate & Government Clients: companies, NGOs, government agencies require event decoration for conferences, TEDEX, seminars, or annual general ceremonies
- Entertainment & Community Events: Religious conventions, retreats, and cultural gatherings.
Step 2. Choose a Domain name & Host
A domain is your business name, such as example23.com. Having a domain gives you authority and customers’ trust to patronise, discoverability, a long-lasting, solid identity, and professionalism.
- Hosting Provider. It’s a website store that allows users to store website files, making the site accessible to anyone with an internet connection. As a Nigerian business owner, there are reputable local hosts with great features that accept Naira and offer local support, such as WhoGoHost, TrueHost, and DomainKing.
- SSL Certificate: We highly recommended having this features enabled for security and payment gateway to work properly incase you are running an Ecommerce site. Secure site is everything!
Step 3: Install WordPress.
Once you have settled on a domain and a hosting provider, do these
- Log in to your hosting control panel
- Find the one-click WordPress installer.
- Choosing your domain by selecting the domain name you want WordPress to install on example23.com
- Filling in WordPress setup details
- Click on the “install”
- Access your dashboard
Step 4: Pick a Theme
On the dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Themes, and then click Add New. Look for simplicity and professional design that aligns with your brand identity, is easy to customize, has plugin compatibility, and loads quickly.
Step 5: Install Essential Plugin.
Your blog needs the following essential features, which will help you add new great functionalities.
- Yoast SEO. This plugin helps you with keyword focus and research analysis, excellent readability scoring of your blog content, comprehensive optimization, and real-time guidance, whereby green, red, and orange signs explain how well your content aligns with SEO, all aimed at enhancing your content to be discoverable when people search for what you offer.
- UpdraftPlus. It’s a crucial plugin used for backup, safeguarding your content against loss even when your host is malfunctioning or unavailable. Additionally, it minimizes site crashes and simplifies site migrations.
- Wordfence. It protects your blog against hackers, whether through unauthorized logins, and scans your files, themes, and plugins to detect any errors that could compromise your content.
- WP Super Cache. Your site files are stored, which are static with quicker delivery, cleans up old cached files automatically, and it efficiently works with Content Delivery Network(CDNs)
Step 6: Create Your First Pages & Post
- About Us. Post about why and how you started your business, and what makes you stand out among your competitors.
- Services. What are the services that customers can book? E.g., helping customers choose a colour scheme, style guides, or venue decoration.
- First Blog Post. Create an engaging blog post that readers or customers would turn to as a call to action. “Our Before And After Stunning Decoration for a Recent Couple”
Step 7: Promote Your Blog
Everything about your business is about visibility, which is the core condition essential for an entrepreneur to get noticed:
- Always be active And Share Valuable Content. Understand that social media is designed for daily interaction between you and your readers by sharing insightful content about your services. When you state what you do as a small business owner, readers will get to know you well and demand your services.
- Be familiar with the rules and cultures of social media. All social media platforms have their own basic rules, manners, standards, and culture for how they operate. Study all their patterns and relate them to their language usages; it will help you grow big.
- Engage with other people’s posts. A thoughtful comment will prompt a review of your profile.
- Share your Posts on Social Media platforms for backlinks and engagement
- Ensure to send updates weekly to your subscribers through their email
Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid in Nigeria
- Inconsistency. Failing to show up consistently can hinder your business’s aims and objectives, causing undesired setbacks.
- Poor Images. Using irrelevant images or poor design can hinder your business, causing potential customers to become confused and turn to your competitors.
- No SEO. Failing to optimize your content with keyword research, or poor content, can easily be recalled, and is a significant disadvantage you should avoid
- Too Salesy. Too much marketing of your business without offering value will lead customers to assume you are only interested in collecting their money.
- Poor website design and bad user experience especially for mobile users
Conclusion.
A business owner must understand that aiming to grow their business requires a great marketing strategy. Having a social media presence alone isn’t enough to boost your business, gain visibility, and drive sales. However, incorporating methods such as blogging and sharing successful stories can help you achieve your desired results. With blogging, you can have numerous opportunities to access business opportunities, identify your target audience, and, with hard work, dedication, and determination, achieve your goals. The best blogging site to use is WordPress.
