Should you blog for your business?
The answer is yes. Blogging is one of the best ways to build awareness for your business and generate new customers. If you’re not sure how blogging helps, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we share the biggest reasons why your blog is an amazing marketer.
Benefit #1: Blogging Improves Your SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimisation. Most customers start their search for products and services online through a Google or Bing search. It’s crucial that your business pops up when someone searches for a product/service that you sell. Otherwise, they’ll find your competitors and go with them.
By creating and maintaining a blog, you’ll improve your website’s search engine optimisation. This, in turn, increases your chances of getting found through search engines. In addition to home pages, search engines frequently return blog posts in their search results. So, both your general website and your blog posts about a product/service that you provide may pop up in a search. Just remember to use keywords intentionally in your blog posts.
Benefit #2: Blogging Generates New Leads
Once a visitor lands on your blog, they become a potential customer, i.e. a new lead. You can use the content of your blog to attract new leads. In your blog, focus on the topics that matter to your target audience. What are they currently searching for in Google, Bing, et al? Create content that answers their questions.
Benefit #3: Blogging Educates Your Prospective Customers
While blogging is a form of marketing, it’s a mistake to think of your individual blog posts as ads for your product.
Instead, business blog posts are primarily educational in nature. They’re meant to teach your audience something.
Take this blog post for an example— this post teaches you about the benefits of blogging. Your blog posts will do something similar with your chosen topic.
Benefit #4: Blogging Builds a Relationship With Your Prospective Customers
Your prospective customer won’t buy until they trust you. The best way to build trust is by delivering non-stop value to your audience. Once they see that they can trust your information, they begin to trust you as a credible resource. This leads to them actually purchasing your product.
Benefit #5: Blogging Nurtures a Relationship With Your Current Customers
Instead of focusing only on generating new leads, remember that you also need to keep building the relationship with your current customers.
Research shows that the majority of your business will come from your current business, whether that’s in the form of ongoing sales or from word-of-mouth marketing. Keep them connected to you by creating engaging blog posts that help them find continued success with your product.
Benefit #6: Blogging Helps You Become an Expert in Your Field
You know what your product does, but do you know everything about the problem?
If you write enough blog posts on a topic (i.e. your audience’s problem), you will eventually become an expert on that topic. Your blog posts won’t just point to your solution but also uncover the problem in-depth. Becoming a subject-matter expert will give you a better way to connect with your audience.
Benefit #7: Blogging Gives You Email Subscribers
In addition to building awareness, your blog will build your email list. Hooray for new subscribers!
As you may have heard before, the money’s in the email list. The reason for this is simple. Nine out of 10 website visitors will leave without ever returning. If you can get them on your email list, you have more chances to get them back on your website (to eventually make a purchase).
Blogging gives you a couple of ways to build your email list.
First, you can embed a special type of lead magnet (known as content upgrades) within your blog posts. Content upgrades encourage readers to subscribe to your email list so they can get additional, locked content (such as a checklist or toolkit).
Another way to build your email list through your blog is by attaching a simple opt-in form at the end of your posts. Tease a valuable stream of related content and watch people sign up.
Benefit #8: Blogging Entices Visitors to Stick Around
Your home page. Your product page. Your contact page. Informative but static. Once someone has visited those pages, there’s no reason to stick around for longer than five minutes. But if you have a blog with lots of content, your visitor has a lot of reasons to linger.
Your blog provides many opportunities for the visitor to educate themselves about their pain points. This is the number-one reason why you should add internal links in your blog posts. Internal links are hyperlinks that connect to your other posts (or pages). The more links you can add to other posts, the longer your visitor will stay on your site, and this also increases the likelihood of them making a purchase.
Benefit #9: Blogging Highlights Your Personality
People connect with people, not with a soulless corporation. Your static pages (such as your home and product pages) are purely promotional. Your blog is your opportunity to educate and also relate to your audience on a human level.
You can also show off your brand’s personality through your blog. You control how you present yourself by the way you write, and that presentation becomes a reflection of your brand. In other words, if your blog posts are friendly, approachable, and conversational, the same is true of your brand’s personality.
Benefit #10: Blogging Increases Exposure for Your Business
Once you start blogging, people start noticing. And not just your customers, but also your competitors, and those in your industry. Content marketing is one of the best ways to get more exposure for your business.
While your focus should always be on your customers (and not your industry), you can attract the attention of your industry’s leaders and influencers by inviting them to participate in your blog posts. Ask to interview them or to get quotes from them. Or even extend an offer for them to write a guest post on your blog.
If they do participate, you can then use their influence to gain more exposure for your blog. They’ll likely tell their followers to check out your posts, which gets new eyes on your blog.
You learn more about your audience through blogging. Here's how:
Benefit #11: Blogging Allows You to Learn More About Your Audience
You learn more about your audience through blogging.
First, if you allow comments, you find out exactly what your audience thinks (because they never hold back in the comments section).
Second, you can find out what types of people are attracted to your content. Using your website analytics, you can find out where your audience comes from, which posts are most popular, and which posts are not resonating at all with your audience.
Third, you can directly ask your blog reader questions in the form of a pop-up survey. If you keep the questions short and sweet, they’re more likely to participate.
Your blog gives you more opportunities to gather feedback from your audience. This, in turn, empowers your future marketing.
Benefit #12: Blogging Gives You More Content
Blogging is the gift that keeps on giving. Once you create one blog post, you can slice it up and turn it into many additional pieces of content. For example, one blog post can be repurposed to create:
- Two email newsletters (to promote the blog post)
- 10 Facebook posts (in the form of actionable tips from the article)
- 10 Instagram posts (pull visual quotes from article by using a tool like Canva)
- 3-5 Youtube videos (create short, informational videos based on the sub-topics within your blog post)
- 1 LinkedIn post (create a condensed article with key takeaways from your original post)
- 1 podcast episode (use your blog post as a guide for your podcast episode)
Final Thoughts
Blogging is great for business. Not only can it lead to more sales, blogging can also nurture your existing customers and ensure that they stick around and tell others about you— or, better yet, forward your posts to others.