If you have a business, you may already have a website with information pages visitors can skim through. But the truth is, having a website with just information pages is not enough.
To demonstrate your authority in your business space, it makes sense that you get an up-to-date blog for your business’ website.
In this article, we will go through some of the important reasons you should start a blog for your business.
Benefits of Blogging
A blog is a publication you make online, where content is created and posted on a continual basis. It can take different forms, but the underlying principle is the same.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you should get a blog for your business:
It Drives Traffic to Your Website
If you have a business, then it’s almost certain that you would want more website visitors.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways people find websites:
- For an audience that already knows you, they can type your name straight into their browser to get to your website. However, this doesn’t increase your traffic because these customers already know your website and constitute your current traffic.
- Another way is paying for traffic by purchasing an email list. This is a “no way!” way of getting traffic, not to talk of illegal. You shouldn’t bombard people who don’t know you with emails while you hope some of them will open and go through the emails. Plus, it is unnecessarily expensive.
- Also, you could run paid ads. This method is not wrong, but it can cost you quite some money. This means your traffic stops when you’re not running ads. No money, no ad, no traffic.
So, how do you get new traffic to your website? This is where blogging and search engine optimization for your website come in.
Considering how many pages you have on your website, you’d quickly realize there aren’t so many.
You’d also realize that you only get to update those pages occasionally. This is where blogging solves both of those problems.
When you create and publish a post on your blog, that’s an extra indexed page on your website. This means you give your website another chance to show up on the SERP (search engine results page) and pull more traffic to your website through organic search.
Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media
When you have a blog for your business website, it can also help it get discovered on social media.
Your business can get exposed to a new set of audiences, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. How it works is this: Every time you make a new post on your blog, you make content available for people to share via social media.
In cases like this, you don’t necessarily have to create new content. You can just repurpose your blog content to suit the social media content style. This will help keep your social media presence active because you now have a content repository to pull from.
What the cycle ends up looking like is this: You keep your social media reach strengthened with your blog content, and in turn, your social media channels drive traffic to your website.
Conversion of Traffic into Leads
You’ve learned how to get traffic and have some traffic coming to your blog. The next step is to turn the web traffic into leads.
Just like each blog post you make is an added indexed page, each post allows you to get new leads.
You don’t have to go through any complicated process to do this. It can be as simple as adding a call-to-action for lead generation to every blog post you make.
A lead call-to-action can be anything from free ebooks to webinars, fact sheets, trails, or any content of value that someone wouldn’t mind giving you their information in exchange for.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how traffic-to-lead conversions work:
- You get a website visitor
- The visitor sees a free offer from your call-to-action
- The visitor gets to a landing page after clicking the call-to-action, where they see a form that they can fill in their information
- The visitor fills out the form, submits the information, and then receives the free offer.
Note: Something important that you should know is that only some of your blog readers are going to become leads. Good practice will be to keep blogging and include calls to action on every post. Then set a benchmark for your visitor-to-lead conversion rate, and work to increase the benchmark monthly.
Drives Long-term Results
Sometimes, there are common questions that the customers and readers of a blog have, and the best blog owners make sure to answer them.
Your blog is a great way to appear as an authority to your audiences and establish yourself as a thought leader. You achieve this by consistently creating and publishing valuable content for your target audience.
Imagine you had a confused customer, and upon reading an educational post from your blog, things become clearer. Even in the case of a salesperson who has a blog post, they could close many more leads when their blog post is discovered.
Although “establishing authority” is not a metric as concrete as leads and traffic, it greatly impacts audience behavior.
Here’s how it works:
- Prospects that visit your blog frequently to discover answers to questions they have are far more likely to slide through your sales funnels and eventually make a purchase.
This is because they have come to trust you based on the value they’ve been getting from you through your blog. So, even if they didn’t plan to buy anything before, your blog has opened up an opportunity.
- Prospects that are familiar with your blog are no longer part of your cold audience. This results from them knowing more about your services and products and your place in the industry and market.
In this case, you are no longer relating as strangers.
- Salespeople also have an archive they can pull from whenever they encounter questions from prospects requiring them to explain in-depth. This will make the sales process move along much faster than if the salesperson had to create this resource from scratch.
Link Building
There are about 200 factors that Google’s algorithm considers when it comes to ranking a website on the search engine result page. Among those 200 factors are inbound links and backlinks.
Many business owners and experts also believe backlinks are the 3rd most important factor for SEO.
Generating inbound links is important, but a good percentage (41%) of SEO experts believe link building is the most demanding part of SEO.
Creating relevant and valuable articles for your potential customers is one part. Another part is linking to other companies that your potential customers consider industry leaders. This makes it easier for you to gain relevant links.
It gives a vote of confidence and is more like a recommendation when there are links to authority websites. This also lets Google know that you are not just an industry expert but also trustworthy.
Backlinks also assist in building your domain authority, which improves your website’s ability to be discovered in search engines.
It Helps to Share Company News
You can also share company stories and news through your blog. This is one of the benefits that having a blog offers both big and small businesses.
It can contain updates about your company and other information besides regular articles and educational tips. For instance, if you just got a new operations manager, you can share it on your blog.
If you just had an interview with a leading expert in an industry, you can post it on your blog. If you have a case study, and you know it would help your customers and audience, you can also share it on your blog.
You can get attention for a show you’re about to host by writing about it on your blog. The possibilities are numerous.
Search engines like blogs only as far as those blogs provide relevant information to the readers. This is why your content should be interesting enough for your target audience and useful enough for them to return.
When you share news about your company, it helps your audience see that you are not just about money, and it also humanizes your brand.
It Drives Long-term Results
Many business owners would be glad if they could take that break, like a vacation trip, hit the gym, have a good sleep, and still get to drive traffic to their site. The best part about blogging is that it can help you do this through search engines.
For instance, imagine you take an hour on a Sunday to write and publish a blog post. Then imagine the blog post here gets about 100 views, and 10 leads the following day. Then on Tuesday, it gets an additional 50 views with five leads following as some people discover it through your social media platform. Then some of your subscribers get caught up with the post in their email and RSS.
After a few days, the excitement from that particular post dies down, and you have about 150 views and about 15 leads from it. But it doesn’t end there.
Since you have that post now ranking, this means that in days, weeks, months, and even years to come, you are able to generate traffic from that post.
This is how someone who is on vacation or hitting the gym can, at the same time, drive traffic and leads to your website. The effort you put into creating the blog can lead to your website getting thousands of leads as time passes.
Another benefit of having a blog is how you can monetize them in different creative ways. The affiliate marketing strategy, for instance, lets you generate income from almost any blogging topic. It’s a good business strategy blog for small business loan blogs.
Many affiliate programs allow you to generate income by referring interested individuals to relevant services and products.
Your old articles are among your strongest assets, as they are more likely to generate more sales in the long run. These posts can be called compounding posts because of the long-term momentum they bring. Not all posts will be compounding, but the more relevant you write, the more likely you will have more of those.
When you begin a blog for your business, you might not see the results immediately. But over time, you will be able to account for a predictable amount of views and leads as they generate traffic for your business. This is without adding any extra cost of investment because you have done the work needed to generate traffic already.
Conclusion
Blogs are an excellent way to boost the credibility of your business. They are great tools for sharing your expertise and knowledge with your prospects and target audience.
While doing this, your brand visibility and reputation are also being enhanced. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert writer to do this. Although hiring a writer is possible, you just have to make high-quality content posts regularly.
Then again, there’s that option of hiring a freelance writer or a PR agency to help you create high-quality and professional content. They can do this for you while you channel your energy to focusing on the other aspects of your business.
Leave a Reply