Blogging is an inexpensive way for small businesses to drive traffic to their site and attract more perspective customers.
A blog is a compilation of thoughts, facts, and expert opinions relating to the business, industry or its audience. It is a written piece of information that lives online and can be accessed by anyone who visits that company’s website.
One of the biggest benefits of blogging is that consumers come to you for information rather than you pushing sales onto them. Here are some interesting stats:
- Businesses that publish regular content receive 8x more traffic
- Blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%
- Blogging helps in achieving 3x more leads
Let’s learn about six other benefits of blogging.
Blogging drives traffic to your website
Think about the way people find your website. If they know the name of your business, they can type it in and find you. But what if they don’t know your name?
You could pay to have traffic come to your site (PPC/Google AdWords), or you could optimize your site so that when people type something into the browser, they find you (organic).
All of the major search engines love fresh, relevant content and blogging is one of the most straightforward and inexpensive methods for a business to create this.
How many pages are on your website? Five? Ten? That’s 5 or 10 opportunities to be found. Wouldn’t you like more than that?
Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website in organic search.
What if you blogged every week? You would add 52 new ‘pages’ to your site per year. That’s 52 more opportunities to get found! If you blog daily, it would mean 260 opportunities (assuming you take the weekend off).
It’s also a cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what new content to index.
One of the ways is to write blog posts around keywords that your customers search for. This is a great way to make sure you’re publishing relevant content.
Also, every time you write a blog post, you’re creating content that people can share on social media, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and that exposes your business to a new audience that may not know you yet.
Blogging helps convert traffic into leads
Checklists and tips in a blog post can help attract a new customer and get him or her interested in your products or services.
“How-to” topics can convert customers that might need a little push and a little more information about a product.
Most importantly, you can put a call to action on your blog posts that lead to free eBooks, free fact sheets, etc in exchange for their email address.
Once you have their email address, you can send them communication and promotions about your products or services. The more touch points you have, the greater chance you’ll have of them converting.
Businesses often use blogs and content presentations as a channel to announce new products, features, and inform customers about their brand and the solutions they can provide.
Helps establish your business as an industry leader
Blogging is a great way for businesses to share knowledge with their customers about the industry or other relevant interest areas.
It doesn’t matter how small your business is, blogging is a good way for your business to build trust and confidence in your business. A user who reads your blog often develops a relationship with you and trusts you.
Your blog posts can demonstrate your expertise in a particular subject area by sharing high-quality and relevant information with your readers. Over time, you an become known as a go-to resource that provides consistent and useful information to help your readers learn about new tools and resources, solve tough challenges and advance their own businesses.
The best business blogs answer common questions their audience has. If you’re consistently creating content that’s helpful for your target customer, it’ll help establish you as an authority in their eyes.
If prospects find answers to their common questions via blog posts written by people at your company, they’re much more likely to come into the sales process trusting what you have to say.
In general, the more popular your blog is, the easier it is for you to get clients because of the exposure they get, but you also become recognized as an expert in your field.
People are much more likely to notice your expertise if you share it.
Creates value for your customers
The most important benefit of blogging is to create value for your customers. You want to provide a better customer experience than your competitors.
Some things you could share would be a helpful checklist, ideas, recipes and so on.
The more your potential customers can get from you for free, the more loyal they will be when they become customers. Educating first before selling is always a good tactic!
If your blog truly creates value for users, search engines are going to pick it up. No matter what.
Develops and strengthens relationships with existing and new customers
One of the best parts of a successful business blog is the communication, collaboration and sharing that can take place in the comments.
Customer engagement is an immensely important element of online marketing and branding.
Blogging provides the opportunity for you to connect with your existing and potential customers in a different, more conversational way.
With an active comment section, you will be able to respond directly to their comments, which is huge in building trust and relationships.
A business blog doesn’t have to be all business, all the time. You can avoid having a boring business blog by injecting some of your personality by going off topic occasionally and using humor.
Blogging creates opportunities for sharing
One of the most powerful benefits of blogging is the opportunity it creates for others to share the link to your blog.
This creates the potential for viral traffic and exponential market growth. With so many different sharing platforms available, visitors can share the direct link to the blog, tweet it, or email it to a friend. This is the epitome of free marketing.
Summary
If you are interested in increasing your online exposure, while establishing yourself as an expert in your industry, then you will definitely want to take advantage of blogging as a marketing strategy.
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