Business blogging should never be confused with regular everyday blogging. It is not a place for you to rant about your competitors or tell amusing stories about your customers, but a platform for you to gain new business. You might have heard the phrase “content is king” and it still reigns true – the more high-quality content you have, the better.
So why should you start blogging for your business?
Drives more traffic
So you have a website and its address is printed on your business cards, which is great for people who you’ve met, but what about potential customers? They won’t know your company’s name so will (hopefully) find your website through the search engines. But how often do you edit your website? A product or service page is unlikely to change much, so you’ll probably struggle to think of new things to say.
This is why a blog is useful. Every blog post you write is another indexed page, which gives your business website more chance of showing up in the search results, but it’s also fresh and unique content to keep Google happy, which is important for the SEO on your company website. If your blog posts tackle problems, current issues or trending topics, people will be searching for the answers you have written about.
Turns traffic into leads
Of course, providing information to visitors is all very well, but what you want is for them to become your customers. Make sure that each blog post has a call to action for visitors to find out more or to complete if they want more information. A simple way to generate leads is to offer these visitors something for free, be it an ebook, case study or media pack. If you ask people for their details before they receive this document, you will be able to follow up with them directly.
Whereas you might write a blog post once or twice a week, producing more in-depth articles doesn’t have to be as frequent – potential customers are always interested in testimonials and case studies, but they don’t expect them to be weekly!
Even if visitors don’t sign up to your newsletter or give you a call, if your blog posts are high-quality, people will remember it and might return to your site at a later date when they do want a service from you.
Improves your authority
As I mentioned before, you should treat your blog posts as an educational resource for visitors to your site. If a lot of your prospective customers ask you the same question, try to answer it in a detailed blog post. Then when the next person asks the same question you can send them the blog post you prepared earlier. Authoritative content helps to build trust with your customers and prospective customers and they may see you as the go-to company for certain things.
Google also likes websites that people trust and if you have decent written content, it will help your rankings, because Google gives priority to websites offering strong, comprehensive content. Not only that but if people link to your blog post because they found it useful or interesting, that will also improve your authority online with the search engines and increase your ranking.
Provides you with additional content
If you’re still getting your head around social media and online communication, then blog posts are free content for you to use. Share them with your followers on social media, put links to them in your newsletters and send them to your customers.
You can get a lot of mileage out of a blog post so the more you have, the better your marketing and communications will be.
Gives long-term results
A blog post might take you an hour or two, which might seem like a lot of time wasted. However, once that blog post has been published, it is on the internet for all time. You might get 100 visitors the day you publish it, because you share it on social media and send it to your customers in a newsletter and maybe a few leads as a result but traffic will continue to arrive on your site for days, weeks and months afterwards.
As time goes by, people will come across it randomly through a search engine, social media post or from a site that has linked to this piece of content. To increase the chance of people discovering your content, make sure that all content is optimised.
Just like social media, blogging can seem like a lot of work for very little return, but if your business commits to writing regular blog posts and sharing this content across your marketing channels, the benefits and lead generation can be surprisingly positive.
