Whether you’re an independent person or a company, a blog is a good way to start building your brand. It’s one of the best ways for generating organic traffic, which means you won’t have to continuously pay to get leads. It also helps to establish yourself as an authority/expert in cybersecurity. The downside is that it takes a lot of time to build a significant amount of traffic. It can take anywhere from 1-3 years to get a really good following, there are exceptions but generally this is how it will take to start seeing tens of thousands in monthly traffic if you’re not already an established brand. Here are some tips you can use to speed up the process and make content that is likely to rank high and get good engagement:
1) Choose a platform
The first thing you need to do for your blog is decide on what platform you are going to use. The main platforms for blogs are wordpress, wix and squarespace. All of these platforms are good, so look around and pick one that you are comfortable with to get started. WordPress is probably the most popular option and supports over 25% of all websites. Also, wordpress has tons of plugins that you can use to customize your website.
2) Be consistent
Next you want to make sure you are posting on a regular basis, ideally 2-4 times a week. Consistency is probably the single most important thing in growing a blog over time. You need to have a lot of content for people to find and read if you want them to be on your site for a long time. Each piece of content that gets indexed by google will help you rank higher in search results as they start building backlinks and start getting shared around on the web.
According to data from Hubspot, companies that published 16 blogs posts or more per month had 3.5 times the traffic of companies that blogged less than four times per month.
3) Post on multiple outlets
This means outlets like twitter, linkedin, instagram, facebook etc. For cybersecurity in particular, you want to make sure you share your content on twitter and linkedin. These are the two most popular places for resharing cybersecurity content. There are online tools like socialqplus that lets you reshare your content to multiple social media outlets all at the same time.
4) Understand your audience and what they search for
Within cybersecurity there are different target audiences and you want to make sure your content is directed at your specific target audience. For example if your company focuses on penetration testing you’re going to want to make content that will appeal to decision makers (Middle Managers, Directors etc) that are looking for penetration testing services for their business. Whoever your target audience is will affect what type of blog posts you write, how you title them and your SEO strategy.
5) Use SEO tools
SEO tools like ubersuggest are a good way to determine what topics will generate the most traffic and what topics are easiest to rank for in search results. This is important because when you first start out with your blog most likely you won’t have many backlinks and your domain authority will be low. Simply put it will make it difficult for you to be the first webpage that comes up when someone puts a search into google so you want to target keywords/keyword phrases that aren’t very competitive so that you have a better chance of appearing on the first page of search results.
6) Write How to articles
How to articles are one of the most popular types of blog posts you can write and that’s why I recommend writing plenty of these for your blog. When people are using Google, often they are looking for the solution to a problem such as “How do I become PIPEDA compliant” or “How to configure an AWS firewall”. If you create How to articles around your target audience’s needs you can capture a lot of traffic and grow your blog quickly.
7) Do technical walkthroughs
Another type of article that is very popular in cybersecurity are technical walkthroughs. A walkthrough is simply a guide that shows you how to do something step by step so that other people can follow along. This can be showing readers how to setup and install a piece of software, how to configure a firewall, start a cloud instance or how to exploit/mitigate popular vulnerabilities.
8) Talk about the latest news in the industry
The last tip for a cybersecurity blog is to talk about the latest news in the industry. There’s always new news stories in cybersecurity including: new hacks, data breaches, vulnerabilities, legislation or security standards. If you’re one of the first people to write on any of these topics you can rank very high in search engines and start to become known as one of the best sources of information within the industry.